While many successful entrepreneurs have come from difficult backgrounds, few have faced the horrors that Ashish Thakkar and his family went through.
Mr Thakkar, who today is the founder and boss of the pan-African Mara Group conglomerate, was 12 years old when he and his parents and sister fled the Rwandan genocide in 1994.
After sheltering with more than 1,200 other terrified people at a hotel in Rwanda’s capital (the one at the centre of the 2004 film Hotel Rwanda, the Hollywood movie about the genocide), they were able to get on a flight out of the country.
“Fortunately we came out alive,” says Mr Thakkar, now 32. “But unfortunately my parents lost everything they’d built up between 1972 and 1993.”