Phuthi Mahanyele Dabengwa was born in 1971 in South Africa in Soweto. Her father passed away in 2012 and her mother when she was just 17 years old. At 17, she left South Africa to go to the USA where she attended Douglass College and attained a Bachelors degree in Economics in 1993. She later pursued an MBA at De Montfort University in the UK and graduated in 1996. In 2008, she completed an executive education program at Harvard.
She was the Head of Project Finance at the Development Bank of Southern Africa. In 2004, she was the Managing Director of Shanduka Energy and later became the CEO of Shanduko Group, a company founded by President Cyril Ramaphosa. In 2019, she made history by becoming the first black and first female CEO of Naspers South Africa.
She is also a patron of the National Education Empowerment Trust. She was named Forbes Woman Africa Businesswoman of the Year in 2014 and in 2019, won the CNBC Africa’s All Business Leaders Woman of the Year Award. She was married to the late Sifiso Dabengwa, the former CEO of MTN Group.
