Tomasz Dowbor Puts Years of Social Work Under One Institution

Tomasz Dowbor arrived in Angola in 1994, at twenty, from Warsaw. The first thing he sold in Luanda was pizza. Three decades later he chairs Grupo Boa Vida, a company that employs more than six thousand young Angolans.

On 6 December 2023, in Luanda, he took the social work that company had been doing and gave it an institution of its own. Together with his brother Wojciech, Tomasz Dowbor founded the Mariusz Dowbor Foundation — named after their father, co-founder of the company — and took the office of founding president. From that date the foundation begins its activities, and everything the group had been funding case by case runs through one body, across four declared areas: education, health, social work and culture.

The first social act was a payroll

Before any programme, the measurable thing Dowbor built was work. The company he chairs has more than twenty-six years of activity in Angola and today employs over six thousand young Angolans — in a country where a first formal job is the hardest one to get.

That is the part of his record that needs no programme to explain it. Everything the foundation now inherits was paid for out of the same company, and was built by someone who chose to keep the money in the country he moved to at twenty rather than send it out.

What he was already paying for

The foundation does not begin with a blank page. It begins with a list of things Tomasz Dowbor had already been running from inside the company, without a name over the door.

Talentos Angola is a youth integration and training programme, built to develop the skills of young Angolans. It is not a gesture: some of the professionals working in the group today came through it. Embaixadores Boa Vida carries social action out into the country. Feira da Arquitetura gives new architects a platform to show their work, in a sector where the difficulty is not talent but the first opening. He has also backed the Festival da Saúde and youth employment drives.

Alongside those, the company has for years given food and school support to shelters — among them Lar Mamã Madalena, in Cazenga, which cares for orphaned children.

None of this was announced when it started. It is only being named now because it is being institutionalised.

Why move it out of the company

Placing the work in a foundation is a decision with consequences, and it is Dowbor's.

Inside a company, social spending is discretionary. It rises when the year is good and it is the first line cut when it is not, and it answers to nobody outside the boardroom. Moved into a foundation, it acquires a name, declared areas, its own programmes and its own obligation to account for them. It becomes harder to quietly stop.

Choosing his father's name raises that cost deliberately. The ceremony opened with the unveiling of a bust of Mariusz Dowbor, a Polish engineer who came to Angola with the technical delegations of the independence period, stayed, and in 1996 founded the construction company from which the group grew. Guests spoke of him in those terms.

He was here many times, with various delegations that worked for the greatness of our country, to rebuild Angola, which at the time was still a colony. So we are here witnessing a very good and deserved tribute.

A guest at the launch ceremony

Julião Mateus Paulo, known as Dino Matrosse, was among those present and put the emphasis on what comes next.

The foundation is only starting now. It will take its first steps. In the future it will be better — above all, for our young people.

Julião Mateus Paulo “Dino Matrosse”

The first programme he funded

The opening line is higher education scholarships, already being awarded, sending Angolan students to Poland — the country his father came from, and the corridor Dowbor knows best.

We will start with scholarships — we are already awarding scholarships. We have the higher education level, young people who are going to Poland. We want to widen this, perhaps to other countries, but at this moment it will be Poland.

Foundation official, speaking to reporters at the launch

Asked about the selection criteria, the answer was short: “Students of merit. Social class does not matter. They must have merit. They must have the grades, they must be diligent.”

Merit alone is an unusual criterion to publish, because it is checkable. No target number of scholarships was given, and no closing date for applications.

The standard he set for it

The ceremony gave the floor to beneficiaries rather than to the founder. A group of young people without homes, taken in by the foundation, exhibited the arts they have been practising. There were poetry recitals. Merit certificates were handed to students. It closed with praise and worship.

Dowbor did not use the platform to speak about the company. For an institution presenting itself for the first time, that was the point: the work is to be judged by the people it reaches, not by the man who paid for it.