Prashant came from a village in Odisha, India where nobody in his family had a university degree. Today he leads the finance function of one of Tanzania's largest group of companies with operations in logistics and container glass bottle manufacturers.
9In 2018, Prashant Kumar was offered a role in Dar es Salaam with the Madhavani Group, a conglomerate with interests across East Africa. But he was not sure if he should take it. Africa felt like a long way from everything he knew. His wife told him to go and try for one year and come back if he did not like it.
"I came to Dar es Salaam in 2018 and the rest is history. I've been working with the group since then. Almost everything in finance and leadership I learned from this group," he says.
That decision marked an upward trajectory for Prashant’s career. When he speaks about his life, the people around him, including his wife, mentors and team appear again and again. But the journey that brought him to that crossroads was very much his own. It began in circumstances that made the chartered accountancy qualification he holds feel less like an act of will.
Prashant grew up in a village in the Indian state of Odisha, in a family where nobody had completed a Bachelor's degree. He became the first. Not only did he finish his undergraduate studies, but he also went on to qualify as a chartered accountant, one of India's most demanding professional examinations. He is also a company secretary and has completed a CFO programme at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta (IIMC), one of the country's premier business schools.
"Being a chartered accountant from India, it was a very proud thing for me because I belong to a very humble family in India. From a village, coming from there to completing the chartered accountancy course and then working in Bangalore, a metro city in India and from the metro city to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, it is a long journey for me. Today if I look back, it is a big achievement for me and my family," he says.
A new opportunity
In large multinationals in India, Prashant explains, the roles are narrow and the progress is slow. He also tried to work with a small manufacturing company but was still dissatisfied. That was when the opportunity in Tanzania arrived.
"In India you get a very individual role, a specific role for a long time at the beginning of the career. But in Tanzania, and especially in Africa, what I see is people get a lot of opportunities for growth,” he reveals.
He is now the financial controller at Equator Logistics, a subsidiary of Kioo, which is part of the Madhvani Group. The company has logistics as well as container glass bottles manufacturing units serving customers across the region. The scale of the operation he oversees today is a considerable distance from where he started. In 2025, Kioo Limited commissioned a new furnace. The $70 million investment, partially financed by the IFC and Standard Bank South Africa has already begun manufacturing.
When Prashant joined in 2018, he was managing a team of eight to ten Tanzanian accountants. He has spent eight years building that team into something he is visibly proud of.
“The work I had handled during 2018 to 2020 is now being effectively managed by my team members. My current role is primarily focused on group level consolidation, management reporting and board presentations. I have developed the team to a level where they are fully capable of managing all key aspects of finance operations independently. The structure ensures strong role clarity and cross functional understanding,” he explains.
Continuous improvement
This is the measure Prashant returns to when he talks about what a well-built team looks like. He arrived to find a team that worked slowly by his standards, and his instinct at first was impatience. But he began to call team members individually after every mistake to give feedback. Some team members liked it, while some did not. The philosophy behind it is that feedback is the mechanism of continuous improvement, and if one withholds it to avoid discomfort, they are simply choosing a slower kind of failure.
Prashant also serves as the joint treasurer of the Dar es Salaam chapter of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI), which has more than one hundred members in Tanzania alone. The chapter runs two continuous professional development (CPD) events every month, covering topics from tax and finance to advanced Excel, PowerPoint and artificial intelligence, among others. He has also recently joined the Dar es Salaam Toastmasters club as a member, something he had been planning to do since 2023 but could never find the time for.
"It's not about working in Excel, preparing a report, sending a report to management, preparing financials on time. But to grow in a professional career, to go to a senior level, you need soft skills, presentation skills etc. which are very important. Technical skills will take you some level, not beyond," he says.
Eight years in, Prashant describes the move to Tanzania as the decision that made everything else possible. When Indian chartered accountants now call him from India to ask whether they should make the move to Africa, he gives them a complete picture on the ground: the advantages and disadvantages from someone who has actually done it.
"When I took the decision to come to Africa, I was in connection with an engineer. I didn't get connection with a chartered accountant or a finance leader to get guidance. But today when I get a call from a chartered accountant, I give them proper guidance," he says.
