Business

Kasthuri Soni

Long before she was leading a nonprofit tackling one of the country’s biggest societal challenges, Kasthuri Soni was standing at a chalkboard, teaching imaginary lessons to a patient family audience in Durban. The teaching dream eventually transitioned into accountancy, but the instinct behind it, building people up, never left her.

Soni grew up in a working-class household where her father, an artisan, understood something that policymakers would spend decades trying to codify. “People can steal your money, but they can never steal your education,” he told her. He arranged for her to work in her uncle’s business at a young age, an early lesson in the value of work exposure. “We used to joke that he was paying more for my lunch than I was earning, but he knew it was giving me practical exposure and socialising me to the world of work,” she recalls. Soni became the first person in her immediate family to earn a professional qualification. What her upbringing instilled in her, she believes, was the conviction that self-belief backed by work ethic could take her anywhere.