Mohammed Dewji is a Tanzanian Entrepreneur and philanthropist. He was born in a family of 6 children in Ipembe, a small city in Tanzania.
His initial dream was to become a professional golfer, so he attended Arnold Palmer Golf Academy in Orlando, Florida.
Mohamed then pursued his higher education at Georgetown University, Washington DC where he obtained his degree in international business and finance in 1998.
A year later he decided to go back to Tanzania to take over METL group, an import and export company founded in 1970 by his father. He is well-known for turning this 30 million dollar company into a 1.7 billion dollar conglomerates in less than two decades.
METL that stands for Mohammed Enterprises Tanzania Limited has invested in over 30 factories in various industries such as agriculture, manufacturing, finance, mobile telephony, insurance, trading, real estates, transport and logistics, food and beverages.
According to Forbes, he has basically invested in every industry except in beer and tobacco.
He employs about 28.000 people and contributes a mind-blowing percentage of 3.5 of Tanzania GDP.
He was also a member of the parliament for 10 years, helped increase the access to drinkable water from 23% to 84% by spending millions of dollars in health care and education.
This successful entrepreneur doesn’t like to be called “the youngest billionaire” but instead, the youngest philanthropist.
In 2014 he created the Mo Dewji foundation whose primary goal is to reduce the poverty in rural areas of his country.
He has also joined the Giving Pledge, an initiative started by Bill Gates and Warren Buffet that consists of donating more than half of his fortune to philanthropy to help with the more pressing problems in the world.
We will end this episode with one of Mohammed inspiring quotes: « The most important is what you do with the money that you have instead of money itself. »
