How MDR turned conscience into a business model
Prateek Suri was visiting a university campus in Zambia when he noticed something that didn’t add up. Dropout rates were climbing, but not for the usual reasons. Students weren’t failing academically—they were exhausted. Many lived miles from campus because rent nearby was unaffordable. Some were sleeping on floors. Others had quit entirely.
“It wasn’t about intelligence,” Suri said quietly. “It was about distance — and the cost of proximity.”
That observation led to one of MDR Investments’ more unusual projects: working with the Zambian government to build affordable student housing, solar-powered, with libraries and Wi-Fi included. MDR has secured a memorandum of understanding from the Zambia Development Authority to explore joint initiatives in student housing, mining, and infrastructure development. When the first students got their keys, Suri says something shifted in how he thought about the business.
“It was hope, not just housing,” he said. “That’s when capital with conscience stopped being an idea and became a practice.”
MDR is part of the Maser Group, a $5 billion conglomerate investing in mining, infrastructure, roadways, shipping, and artificial intelligence across the African continent. Suri founded MDR, knowing that Africa doesn’t reward quick wins. He learned that the hard way.
The $65 Million Lesson
MDR’s first major deal nearly turned into a disaster. The firm had committed to a $65 million acquisition of a shipping company in West Africa. It was ambitious for a new player in a region known for complicated negotiations and rules that shift mid-process. Halfway through, after MDR had already put down a substantial deposit, the seller tried to change the terms.
“We were looking at a potential disaster,” Suri recalled. “It wasn’t just money at risk; it was credibility.”
The deal only survived because the local government stepped in to mediate. It went through in the end, but the details of that mediation remain unclear. What concessions, if any, did MDR make? Suri frames it as a lesson in patience and relationship-building.
“That was my real crash course in Africa,” Suri said. “Money gets you to the table, but relationships and patience keep you there. You can’t shortcut trust.”
It’s a lesson many foreign investors claim to have learned. Whether MDR applies it more consistently than others is difficult to assess from the outside.
The refusal to ‘strike gold’
A few years later, MDR was looking at gold. Literally. A mining opportunity in West Africa, the kind that makes investors sit up straight. The numbers were excellent, mining was already in the portfolio, and the opportunity was obvious.
Except the communities living near the site were protesting. Water sources had been contaminated. Safety protocols were being ignored or didn’t exist.
Suri’s team spent weeks assessing whether new management could turn it around. They kept arriving at the same answer: probably not. The problems went too deep.
“I remember sitting with the reports and thinking, do I really want to build wealth on poisoned ground?” he said.
Not everyone at MDR agreed with walking away. Some thought it was a mistake, that the risks could be managed, that the returns justified the effort. Gold is gold, after all. But Suri held the line.
“Sometimes,” he added, “the best deal you’ll ever make is the one you don’t sign.”
He references the decision frequently now, though he won’t say which mine or which country. The contamination levels, the projected yields, the names of the communities involved—all remain unspecified. Mining operations with active protests carry reputational risk, and regulatory risk, and the kind of operational friction that can erode margins regardless of how the spreadsheet looks at the start.
Whether the choice was conscience or calculation, it established something. There are deals MDR won’t touch, even when they’re made of gold.
Turning Chaos into Method
Suri doesn’t romanticise the work. Ask him about operating in Africa and you get a list of headaches: regulations that change midstream, currencies that collapse overnight, infrastructure that doesn’t exist.
“Africa will test you every single day,” he said. “Regulations change midstream, currencies tumble overnight, and sometimes there’s not even a road to the site you’re funding.”
These are real challenges, though framing them as unique to Africa risks reinforcing tired narratives about the continent as uniquely chaotic. Regulatory uncertainty and infrastructure gaps exist in plenty of markets—Africa just doesn’t have the financial cushions or institutional backup systems to absorb the shocks.
Suri argues that the instability is precisely what makes the region interesting. Investors who need certainty will never make it. The ones who succeed learn to read between the lines, build relationships before signing contracts, and think in decades instead of quarters. Credibility comes from actually delivering.
“If you’re waiting for the environment to be perfect, you’ll wait forever,” he said. “Sometimes, you build the road before you build the project.”
MDR has literally funded road construction to access project sites.
Not Charity
MDR also works through the African Financial Federation (AFF), part of the Maser Group, which backs young entrepreneurs in tech, agriculture, and healthcare. Suri describes it as investing in people, not just infrastructure, though he’s quick to point out it’s not charity.
“Africa doesn’t lack talent,” he said. “It lacks the trust and capital that allow that talent to grow. We try to bridge that gap.”
The AFF is less visible than MDR’s infrastructure work, and Suri doesn’t volunteer specifics about portfolio size or outcomes. What’s clear is that it represents a smaller share of the firm’s activity than the headline projects.
Suri pushes back on the idea that this is purely altruistic. In his view, doing good and making money aren’t opposed—they’re linked, at least in the long term.
“Ethics without structure is charity,” he said. “But structure without ethics is exploitation. The goal is to live in the middle — where doing good and doing well reinforce each other.”
‘When the Numbers Get Bigger’
“The real test,” he said, “is whether you stay principled when the numbers get bigger.”
He’s right about that. MDR is still relatively small. The Zambia housing project, however symbolic, doesn’t compete with the scale of the firm’s mining and logistics deals. As the firm grows, so do the pressures—from investors, from partners, from the market itself.
Suri brings up the housing project often, perhaps because it offers a clear answer to what MDR stands for. Most of the firm’s work involves less photogenic decisions: which partners to trust, which regulatory risks to accept, which communities to engage and which to merely compensate.
“The purpose of capital,” Suri said finally, “is not just to multiply wealth. It’s to multiply impact. That’s the only kind of growth that lasts.”
