Why I&M Bank’s Lion’s Den Stands Apart in East Africa’s Entrepreneurship Landscape

In every entrepreneur’s journey, some moments separate those who make it from those who don’t, not the eureka moment of the idea, not the launch, but the grinding stretch between proof of concept and real scale. It is here, in this valley of uncertainty, where most Kenyan startups quietly fold. And it is precisely here that I&M Bank’s Lion’s Den initiative has chosen to stand.

At a time when corporate support for entrepreneurs often amounts to little more than branded calendars and feel-good press releases, I&M Bank has built something that deserves a harder look.

A Bank That Has Actually Redesigned Its Relationship with Small Business

To understand why the Lion’s Den matters, you first have to appreciate the institution behind it.

I&M Bank is not a newcomer to East Africa’s enterprise story. Founded in 1974, the bank has grown from a community-based lending outfit into a regional financial services group with operations spanning Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda, and Mauritius. But what has changed in recent years is not the bank’s size, it is its posture toward the businesses that drive most of the continent’s employment.

Under the bank’s iMara 3.0 strategy, its most ambitious multi-year plan yet, targeting the period through 2026, I&M has placed MSMEs squarely at the centre of its growth ambitions. The results speak plainly: SME customer acquisition in Kenya surged by 270% from December 2023 following the rollout of tailored propositions for small businesses. Operating income grew by 22%, profit before tax by 28%, and the customer base expanded by 49% in 2025 alone. These are not modest shifts in emphasis. They represent a fundamental reorientation toward the builders of Kenya’s economy.

The Lion’s Den sits within this broader architecture, a deliberate initiative designed to translate the bank’s financial muscle and its institutional networks into real outcomes for entrepreneurs who are hungry to scale.

What Makes the Lion’s Den Different

The Kenyan startup landscape has seen its share of pitch competitions and accelerator programs. Many of them are well-intentioned. Fewer of them are well-designed. The typical model, a weekend bootcamp, a trophy, and a LinkedIn congratulatory post, offers little that an entrepreneur can actually use the following Monday.

What distinguishes I&M’s approach is its insistence on building structural value rather than theatrical moments.

Consider the bank’s partnership with B Lab Africa, launched in early 2026 under the Resilient Sustainable Business programme. This nine-week blended learning initiative targets established businesses generating annual revenues between KES 6 million and KES 120 million — companies that are past the fragile idea stage and are now navigating the harder question of how to grow without losing their soul. The programme delivers six expert-led modules covering impact measurement, sustainable supply chains, and the financing of sustainable practices. It also provides bi-monthly one-on-one mentorship calls and cross-border peer networking with business leaders across Kenya, South Africa, Mauritius, and Nigeria.

Critically, I&M Bank absorbs 80% of the cost. Each participating SME contributes only USD 60, with the bank covering the remaining USD 240 per participant. This is not tokenism. This is a bank putting real money where its stated priorities are.

The sectors targeted — Agri-Tech, Green Energy, Manufacturing, the Circular Economy, and Sustainable Consumer Brands — are not arbitrarily chosen. They represent the productive backbone of Kenya’s economy and the sectors most urgently in need of capital, mentorship, and market linkages if the country is to build durable economic competitiveness.

The Ecosystem Logic

What serious observers of entrepreneurship know — and what too many bank-backed programs ignore — is that funding alone does not build businesses. The entrepreneurs who survive the valley between idea and scale need a cluster of things simultaneously: capital, yes, but also knowledge, networks, peer accountability, and exposure to markets they cannot yet afford to reach on their own.

I&M Bank appears to understand this cluster logic.

Through the I&M Foundation, the bank has seeded an Enterprise Challenge Programme that has already reached over 1,700 high school students across 22 schools in remote counties — Narok, Samburu, Marsabit, and Turkana — giving young people access to digital business simulations, startup capital, and mentorship from local business leaders. More than 2,500 participants across the program’s history have acquired entrepreneurship skills, with 43% going on to initiate their own economic ventures.

In partnership with The King’s Trust International and Asante Africa Foundation, I&M Foundation has committed KES 48.1 million toward scaling this programme, targeting 6,300 students by the end of the current cycle. These are students in counties where the formal job market offers almost nothing, and where the entrepreneurial instinct — if cultivated properly — can reshape entire communities.

The Foundation’s endowment itself is structural, funded through a permanent annual commitment of 2% of I&M Bank Kenya’s Profit Before Tax. This is not a discretionary line item that disappears when times get hard. It is baked into the institution’s operating model.

The Credibility of Skin in the Game

There is one test I apply to any institution that claims to champion entrepreneurs: are they willing to bear real risk alongside the people they say they are supporting?

Here, I&M Bank passes with some credibility.

Through a NASIRA portfolio guarantee secured from FMO — the Dutch entrepreneurial development bank — I&M has unlocked USD 15 million in risk-shared financing for its MSME portfolio. The NASIRA programme specifically targets underserved segments: youth-owned businesses, women-led enterprises, and entrepreneurs who have traditionally been excluded from credit markets due to perceived rather than actual risk. By agreeing to share future credit losses with FMO, I&M is not simply marketing financial inclusion — it is underwriting it with its own balance sheet exposure.

Meanwhile, the iMara 3.0 strategy has been accompanied by a branch network expansion to 65 branches across 24 counties — including container branches built from repurposed shipping containers in emerging commercial zones. This physical presence matters because entrepreneurs in Kapsabet or Mtwapa or Narok cannot benefit from programmes that only exist in Nairobi. By bringing both infrastructure and services to where entrepreneurs actually live and work, I&M is doing something that most banks in this market simply do not do.

What the Competition Gets Wrong

It would be unfair to write this piece without acknowledging the landscape in which I&M’s Lion’s Den operates. KCB Bank’s Lions’ Den show — the television format modelled after the global Shark Tank franchise — brought enormous public attention to entrepreneur funding in Kenya, generating pledges north of KES 372 million across its first three seasons and reaching Netflix. It has done real good.

But the television model has a structural weakness that is well-documented: the gap between the camera and the contract. Deals struck under stage lighting are subject to lengthy due diligence processes that can stretch for months. Entrepreneurs who walk off-screen believing they have secured their future often discover that the real work — the due diligence, the legal negotiations, the performance milestones — is only just beginning.

I&M Bank’s approach is quieter, less telegenic, and considerably more durable. It does not offer the high of a televised deal. What it offers instead is structured capacity-building, subsidised expert access, and financial partnerships that are designed to hold. For an entrepreneur who needs to keep the lights on and the payroll covered, that is a more useful proposition.

The Long Game

What I find most compelling about the Lion’s Den, viewed within I&M Bank’s wider ecosystem, is its temporal ambition. This is not a programme built for quarterly reporting cycles or annual CSR reports. The I&M Foundation’s endowment model, the multi-year iMara strategy, the tripartite partnerships that span counties and countries — these are instruments designed for generational change, not press release cycles.

I&M Bank’s Group Regional CEO, Kihara Maina, has described the institution’s long-term ambition as becoming “Eastern Africa’s leading financial partner for growth.” For that ambition to be more than a tagline, it requires the bank to be genuinely useful to the entrepreneurs who are doing the work of building Eastern Africa. The Lion’s Den, the RSB programme, the Enterprise Challenge, the NASIRA-backed lending — together, they constitute a serious attempt to earn that description.

In a market where most institutions talk about supporting entrepreneurs, I&M Bank has at least started doing it. That is not a small thing. In the long arc of East African economic development, institutions that choose to invest in people at the margins of the formal economy — before those people become the headline stories — tend to look, in retrospect, like they understood something the others missed.

The predator in this Lion’s Den, it turns out, is not the investor or the bank. It is the mediocrity that has long stalked Kenya’s entrepreneurship support landscape. And I&M Bank, by all available evidence, is hunting it seriously.

Read Also: Doing Good Through Deliberate Partnership: The I&M Foundation Story