Meet Africa’s richest man, a billionaire who doesn’t own a home outside Nigeria

Aliko Dangote is the richest person in Africa.

Aliko Dangote, 67, first appeared on Forbes’ billionaires list in 2008, and he has been ranked Africa’s richest person every year since.

Dangote earned his billionaire status as the founder of the Dangote Group, Africa’s largest cement producer with branches in 10 African countries.

Despite his immense wealth — and private jet ownership — Dangote revealed in July that he does not own any homes outside Nigeria, choosing instead to invest in real estate in his home country.

Here’s a look at Dangote’s wealth, philanthropy, and famous friendships.

Aliko Dangote is Africa’s richest person with an estimated net worth of $11.7 billion, Forbes reported.

Aliko Dangote. 

Dangote is one of the top 200 richest people in the world at 191st on Forbes’ billionaires list.

Dangote comes from a wealthy family. His great-grandfather, Alhassan Dantata, was a Nigerian businessman and one of the wealthiest people in Kano State, Tom G. Forrest wrote in “The Advance of African Capital: The Growth of Nigerian Private Enterprise.”

He earned his fortune as the founder and CEO of the Dangote Group, Africa’s largest producer of cement.

A Dangote Industries cement plant. 

Dangote was born in Kano, Nigeria, and graduated from Al-Azhar University in Cairo in 1977.

He started a business trading rice, sugar, and cement in 1978 and grew the venture into the Dangote Group, which now produces 51.6 million metric tons of cement each year and employs 24,000 people across 10 African countries, according to the company’s official website.

In January, he opened a $19 billion oil refinery in Nigeria.

The Dangote Petroleum Refinery near Lagos. 

In an appearance on The David Rubenstein Show in 2020, Dangote said that while Nigeria is rich in oil, the country lacked the infrastructure needed to refine it. The Dangote Petroleum Refinery opened near Lagos to help take advantage of Nigeria’s natural resources.

Dangote founded the Aliko Dangote Foundation in 1994 to support public health and education initiatives throughout Africa.

Aliko Dangote at the US-Africa Leaders Summit. 

The Aliko Dangote Foundation is the largest private foundation in sub-Saharan Africa. Its endowment — the largest by a single African donor — has funded the establishment of the Dangote Business School at Nigeria’s Bayero University, microgrants for women in northern Nigeria as part of the Kogi Human Capital Development initiative, and $2 million in humanitarian aid for the World Food Programme.

In April 2020, Dangote funded the construction of COVID-19 isolation centers in Nigeria.

A coronavirus isolation center in Kano, Nigeria. 

The Aliko Dangote Foundation also built a mobile testing center and provided personal protective equipment to healthcare workers.

“There’s no doubt we started on a shaky foundation,” then Kano State’s governor, Abdullahi Ganduje, said in a press release. “With the assistance of ADF, we can see that a friend indeed is a friend in need.”

He’s friends with Bill Gates.

Bill Gates, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, and Aliko Dangote.

In a 2019 blog post titled “How I cemented my friendship with Aliko Dangote,” Gates wrote that he and Dangote “both love to geek out over things that make some people’s eyes glaze over, like cement, fertilizer, and iodized salt.”

Dangote has teamed up with Gates to support charitable causes. In 2016, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Aliko Dangote Foundation joined forces for a $100 million initiative combating malnutrition in Nigeria.

He’s been married and divorced twice and has four children.

Halima Dangote and Aliko Dangote at the Time 100 Gala.

“I’m not getting younger,” he told The Financial Times in 2018 of his single status. “Sixty years is no joke, but it doesn’t make sense to go out and get somebody if you don’t have the time.”

One of Dangote’s daughters, Halima Dangote, is an executive director at the Dangote Group. She attended the Time 100 Gala with him in 2014 when he was named one of Time’s 100 most influential people in the world.

Dangote does not own any homes outside of Nigeria.

Aliko Dangote at an event in Ghana.

During a July media event at the Dangote Petroleum Refinery in Lagos, Dangote said he chooses not to own houses outside Nigeria because he wants to focus on industrialization within the country.

Dangote said that he owns a home in Lagos, as well as in his home state of Kano. He also rents a property in the Nigerian capital of Abuja.