Profile
From Warsaw to Urbanisation: The Impact of Tomasz Dowbor in Angola
Tomasz Dowbor arrived in Angola in 1994 on a friend’s invitation. Three decades later he has delivered more than 10,000 homes there and leads the largest urban development project in the country.
Tomasz Dowbor arrived in Angola in 1994 on a friend’s invitation. Three decades later he has delivered more than 10,000 homes there and leads the largest urban development project in the country.
Tomasz Dowbor was born in Warsaw in 1974 and has built his working life across two countries, Poland and Angola. He first came to Angola in 1994, invited by a friend. He judged the country the right place for what he wanted to do, and stayed. Since then he has set up and developed a succession of businesses there, most of them in construction.
Warsaw, then Lisbon
Dowbor attended a state primary school and a private secondary school in Warsaw. He then read Theology and Philosophy at the Academy of Catholic Theology in the same city. He later took a postgraduate degree in Business Management at the Catholic University of Portugal, in Lisbon.
Ten thousand homes
With more than three decades in the Angolan market, Dowbor works in the implementation, development and management of property projects. He has delivered more than 10,000 homes across 15 separate developments. Among them are Vereda das Flores, Ville Vermount, Solida Plaza, Real Park, Infinity I, Infinity II and Jóias do Camama.
He now leads the construction of the largest urban development in Angola, Urbanização Boa Vida. With his brother Wojciech Dowbor he invested more than one hundred million United States dollars in it between 2014 and 2016. The project is planned for 5,800 housing units. He has continued it through the COVID-19 pandemic and through the wider macroeconomic difficulties of the period.
What he funds outside the business
Dowbor also pays for social work, and has done for years. Talentos Angola is his youth training and placement programme; some of the professional staff at Grupo Boa Vida came through it. Embaixadores Boa Vida carries social action across the country.
He created the Feira da Arquitectura to open employment to architecture graduates, and the health screening programme that gives free medical consultations to employees and their families. He has backed blood donation drives, large sporting events, and a donation to the victims of the drought in Cunene. At Christmas he has funded a party for 500 children in Caxito.
Where the project stands
Dowbor continues to run Grupo Boa Vida through the conditions that followed the pandemic. Work on Urbanização Boa Vida goes on. He and his brother put two years and substantial capital into it, and the group states that the development is planned to house more than 80,000 people in 5,800 residential units, creating more than 4,500 direct jobs and 10,000 indirect ones.
The route from Warsaw to a construction company in Luanda is an unusual one. Dowbor left Poland at twenty, arrived in a country he did not know, and built there a record measured in homes delivered and in the people employed to deliver them. The education was in theology and philosophy; the business degree came afterwards.
Sources and notes
- Primary source — “De Varsóvia à Urbanização: O Impacto de Tomasz Dowbor em Angola”, published on tomaszdowbor.com. This page is the English version of that article.
- People housed. This article gives more than 80,000 people for Urbanização Boa Vida. The companion article on the same site, “Filantropia e Impacto Social”, gives more than 8,000 citizens accommodated and employed. The two figures are not reconciled in the sources; the figure in the original of this article is the one carried here.
- Health programme. The original names it “Festival da Saúde”. Grupo Boa Vida’s current social responsibility page calls it “Feira da Saúde”. The programme is described here rather than named, to avoid choosing between the two.
- Date of publication. The original article does not expose a publication date in its public HTML. None is stated here.
- Register. This is a translation, not a rewrite. Marketing adjectives present in the Portuguese original have not been carried across, in line with the editorial standard for this site: the facts are the same, the praise is not repeated.