$54.5 million new gift from former penniless refugee Mirwais Azizi follows his recent $817,000,000 healthcare donation
On April 24, 2026, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum stood before a gathering of senior royals, officials, and dignitaries and spoke of hope made tangible.
With a few words, he launched the 1 Billion Meals Dates Factory—a vast new facility in Margham that will one day turn humble UAE dates into 150 million nutrient-fortified food units each year, every single one destined for the world’s hungry.
No profits, no exports for sale — just pure, sustained humanitarian aid.
At the center of this ambitious vision was not government money alone, but the quiet generosity of one man whose life reads like an epic of survival, ambition, and redemption.
Mirwais Azizi, the Afghan-born founder of the Azizi Group, had just given about $54.5 million to make the factory a reality. For a man who once fled his homeland with little more than pocket change and the clothes on his back, it was another chapter in a story that keeps circling back to giving.
Born in 1962 in Laghman Province, Afghanistan, Azizi grew up in a country that would soon be torn apart. He earned a law degree from Kabul University, but by the late 1980s, the Soviet-Afghan War had left the future too uncertain. In 1988, he made the wrenching decision to leave.
With roughly $500 to $700, his wife Parigul, and their young children, he crossed into exile. No safety net. No influential family. Just the stubborn belief that life could be rebuilt.
He started small in Uzbekistan, trading textiles. He moved into tobacco and commodities, scraping together whatever opportunities the region offered.
By the early 1990s he had reached the UAE, first trading cigarettes, then pivoting into oil packaging and exports. In 1989 he formally founded the Azizi Group. The leap into banking came in 2006 with Azizi Bank, which grew into Afghanistan’s largest private commercial bank.
But real estate was where his vision truly soared. In 2007 he launched Azizi Developments. Today it is one of Dubai’s powerhouse developers, with more than 45,000 homes delivered and over 150,000 units in the pipeline.
Its portfolio is valued in the tens of billions. The forthcoming Burj Azizi is set to rank among the world’s tallest towers. Forbes now lists Azizi, at 63 or 64, as Afghanistan’s first and only billionaire, with a personal net worth of around $1.4 billion.
Yet those who know him say wealth has never defined him. He still lives humbly. He raised seven children in Dubai, sending them to local schools and watching them thrive in the city that gave his family refuge.
“When we came to the UAE more than three decades ago with just a few million dirhams,” he once reflected, “we found a place that offered safety, hospitality, and endless opportunity.” That gratitude has shaped everything that followed.
Tragedy sharpened it. Over two years ago, his second daughter, Farishta, was diagnosed with cancer. A first round of treatment brought hope, but the disease returned. On October 29, 2024, at just 32, Farishta passed away.
The grief was immense.
In early 2025, Azizi pledged an extraordinary $817,000,000—the largest private donation in UAE history — to SheikMohammed’s Fathers’ Endowment campaign. It will fund a major healthcare district and cancer hospital complex in Dubai, named in Farishta’s memory.
He also committed $500 million for a similar medical city in Kabul, complete with a 400-bed cancer center, maternity hospital, orphanage, and medical university.
His earlier gifts to the 1 Billion Meals Endowment had already shown his passion for fighting hunger.
In 2023 the family contributed Dh100 million, at the time the largest single corporate pledge, urging others to join.
The dates factory feels like the natural continuation — turning a fruit sacred to the region into long-shelf-life, vitamin-enriched bars, pastes, and meals that can reach children and families in crises from Afghanistan to Africa and beyond.
Operations will be led by Al Barakah Dates, a family business founded in 1982 by Saleem Mohamed as a simple food trader. Today it is a global leader in date processing, with a cutting-edge automated facility, top international certifications, and exports to more than 90 countries.
Our partnership with the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Global Initiatives (MBRGI) combines industrial excellence with humanitarian purpose.
When the factory opens at the end of 2027, it will support local agriculture, create jobs, and strengthen supply chains — all while every unit produced travels straight into relief channels aligned with UN Sustainable Development Goals.
For Azizi, this is more than philanthropy. It is memory and mission intertwined.
He knows what it means to be displaced and hungry. He knows the dignity that comes from steady nourishment rather than sporadic handouts.
In interviews, he has spoken of how Dubai transformed his family’s life; now, through these gifts, he is helping transform the lives of countless others who still searchfor safety and sustenance.
Sheikh Mohammed has called the project an endowment-based model for sustainable aid that upholds human dignity. Mohammad Al Gergawi, Secretary General of MBRGI, sees it as a shift toward institutionalized, large-scale action.
But at its heart, the 1 Billion Meals Dates Factory is a deeply human story: a refugee who built an empire returns the blessing by feeding the vulnerable.
From the mountains of Laghman to the sands of Margham, Mirwais Azizi’s journey proves that the greatest fortunes are those shared. In a world still scarred by conflict and want, a simple date—processed with care and given freely—carries the weight of hope across borders.