Ashish Thakkar

Ashish Thakkar was born in Leicester, England, in 1981. His grandparents were Indian traders in Uganda who were expelled, along with tens of thousands of others, when Idi Amin ordered the country's Asian minority to leave in 1972; the family lost almost everything and rebuilt a modest life in Britain. When political conditions eased, his father moved the family back to East Africa, first to Rwanda and then to Uganda and Dubai, chasing new trading opportunities.

Thakkar left school in Dubai at fifteen with no qualifications and, with a loan of about six thousand dollars, began selling computer hardware to businesses in Kampala. The 1994 genocide in Rwanda had devastated the region's economy, and reconstruction created demand for basic goods and services that established firms were slow to meet. He built that single computer business into Mara Group, expanding step by step into real estate, manufacturing, technology and financial services across more than twenty African countries.

He has often described the family's expulsion from Uganda as the backdrop to everything that followed: a lesson that markets others had written off could still be worth building in, and that starting again from very little was survivable. He was appointed to United Nations advisory panels on entrepreneurship and youth employment in Africa.

Now in his forties, he continues to run Mara Group and has argued publicly that African markets are systematically undervalued by outside investors, a case he makes by pointing to his own balance sheet.