Marie-Alix de Putter

Fourteen years ago, at 27 and four months pregnant, her husband was murdered in Cameroon. On her first night as a widow, she was with her hairdresser. When she later considered suicide, that hairdresser helped save her life.

Years later, that experience became a question: who decides where care begins?

In 2021, de Putter founded Bluemind Foundation around a radical but practical conviction: mental health is health, and care should be accessible to everyone, everywhere, every day.

Its flagship award-winning innovation, Heal by Hair, turns the trusted relationship between women and their hairdressers into a pathway to mental healthcare. Hairdressers are trained to recognize early signs of distress, provide quality first-line listening and connect women to additional support & professional care.

From more than 7,000 hairdresser applications, Bluemind has trained over 1,300 hairdressers across Togo, Côte d’Ivoire and Cameroon and reached more than 1.6 million women, at an average cost below US$1 per woman.

De Putter has built the institution alongside the innovation. In less than three years, Bluemind crossed €1 million in funds raised — an unusual trajectory for a young nonprofit built from Francophone Africa. It has attracted support and collaboration across public institutions, philanthropy and research, including the WHO, EU, FID/AFD, IPA and Paris-Saclay University.

And this is not her first act.

Before Bluemind, de Putter spent nearly two decades in strategy, communications and executive leadership across Africa, including leading Africa communications for Morocco’s OCP Group across 15 countries. She is also a published author whose work and story have appeared in The New York Times, Vogue, BBC, The Guardian, Jeune Afrique and Le Monde.

She holds three Master’s degrees and an Executive MBA, with executive education at Harvard Business School and Oxford University. She is a Mulago Rainer Arnhold, Praxis Africa and Archbishop Desmond Tutu Leadership Fellow. Recognitions include Quartz Africa’s 30 Innovators and AIFA’s Best Woman Leader in Africa.

She took personal tragedy, two decades of executive experience and communications expertise — and started again.

Instead of building another awareness campaign, she is building infrastructure. Instead of waiting for scarce specialists to reach millions of women, she started with the people women already trust. And instead of measuring success by how large Bluemind becomes, she is designing Heal by Hair to be adopted and sustained by public systems.

That is reinvention with consequence: turning lived experience into an unconventional idea, that idea into measurable reach, and that reach into a system capable of outlasting its founder.

Women are already speaking. Hairdressers are already listening. Marie-Alix de Putter is building the system that connects that trust to care.