Mo Dewji took over a family trading business in Tanzania. MeTL Group now spans eleven countries and tens of thousands of jobs.
Born in Singida in a mud house, Mohammed Dewji graduated from Georgetown in 1998, returned to run the family company, and grew MeTL from 30 million dollars in revenue to over 1.5 billion.
Mohammed Dewji was born in 1975 in Singida, in a house built from sand and mud. By the time he started school, his father had built the family shop into a thriving import-export company. He studied in Arusha and Dar es Salaam, and in 1998 graduated from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., with a degree in international business and finance.
Home to the family firm
He returned to Tanzania to manage Mohammed Enterprises Tanzania Limited, MeTL, a commodities trading business founded by his grandmother. After two years he became chief financial officer. In the early 2000s, when the government privatised loss-making companies, he acquired them inexpensively and turned them into profit centres.
Between 1999 and 2018 he took MeTL’s revenue from about 30 million dollars to over 1.5 billion. The group has investments in manufacturing, agriculture, trading, finance, mobile telephony, insurance, real estate, transport and logistics, and food and beverages. It operates in 11 countries and employs more than 28,000 people, and its operations contribute about 3.5 percent of Tanzania’s GDP.
He served as a member of parliament for his hometown of Singida from 2005 to 2015, and in 2013 became the first Tanzanian on the cover of Forbes. The story shows how an inherited business grows when a new generation brings training, discipline and ambition.
