As former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan observed in his Millennium Report, “New technology offers an unprecedented chance for developing countries to ‘leapfrog’ earlier stages of development. Everything must be done to maximize their peoples’ access to new information networks.” Information and communications technology (ICT) is considered an important tool for growth in developing economies.
Not only does ICT have immense benefits to an economy but some argue that, in an increasingly globalized economy, countries that fail to get connected will fall even further behind. One such proponent of this argument, and a man who is passionate about preventing Ghana from such a dismal fate, is Herman Chinery-Hesse, the founder and chairman of SOFTtribe, the largest indigenous software firm in Ghana.
Born to civil servant parents in Dublin, Ireland, Chinery-Hesse and his two siblings grew up in many African and European cities. This may have contributed to his restless desire to discover new things. He attended Westlake High School in Texas and then graduated from Texas State University with a degree in manufacturing and engineering technology. Chinery-Hesse then moved to London where he worked as a manufacturing engineer. It was here that he discovered his love for software.
“I was working for a company who were carrying out the computerization of the company and they selected me to be part of the team because I was schooled in the States, hence it was assumed I would be good at programming,” he says.
With some basic experience in robotics, Chinery-Hesse took up the challenge and learned everything he needed to know about the new computerization software. After a short period of time, he mastered the programming and was managing the company’s new production system.
This was when his love for programming was born.
“I liked programming more than engineering because you can see the results of your work straight away, with engineering you can spend your whole lifetime just building a bridge,” he says.
Chinery-Hesse already had a basic knowledge of programming. While in college, he and his roommate used software programming to generate call cards to make illegal calls. However, his skills were honed when he was in Britain. With his first paycheck he bought a computer and taught himself programming. His skills developed so well, he quit his engineering job and started programming and consulting from home.
Despite his success, Chinery-Hesse missed Ghana.
“The pan-Africanist in me never wanted to stay abroad, so I packed my stuff after a while, came back to Ghana for a holiday and never went back,” he says in his usual offhanded and matter-of-fact way.
On his return to the motherland, Chinery-Hesse had to decide whether to do manufacturing or programming. He originally chose manufacturing but realized there was one key barrier in his way.
“I didn’t have any money to set up a factory, but I had a computer and that was my factory.”
Chinery-Hesse set up his ‘factory’ in his bedroom with one computer and began programming. His company, SOFTtribe, grew organically with no major investment. Soon, Chinery-Hesse developed enough software programs to buy a second computer and then a third. His first client was a friend who, about 20 years ago, gave him a contract to computerize his farm for around $4,000. Without properly assessing how much work needed to be done, Chinery-Hesse accepted the challenge and began working. Other contracts, with clients such as Expertravel and Ghana Airways, soon followed.
At a time where information technology was almost non-existent in Africa, it was a risk to start his business.
“[President Kwame] Nkrumah told me there was nothing I could not do. If we want to build rockets, we can build rockets, it is just a matter of decision,” says Chinery-Hesse.
Following the dream of the man who led Ghana to independence, Chinery-Hesse was determined to prove that information technology was the way forward. There were challenges; in those days, a lot of clients had no idea what they needed and Ghana also has a culture of preferring not to pay for services.
Chinery-Hesse had to be innovative in his approach. He decided to package products, which provided key services, and sell it. SOFTtribe marketed and sold all its products to different sectors. Point of sale software was created for all the major multinationals, networking platforms developed for small businesses, as well as solutions for oil and gas, software products for the agriculture sector and consumer products for households.
SOFTtribe immediately made a turnover and doubled its growth each year until, at its peak, it had over 100 employees. Inevitably, the company had to move from Chinery-Hesse’s bedroom to its own office. Today, SOFTtribe is the most significant player in the software market in Ghana.
With growing competition from established brands, like Oracle, Microsoft and IBM, SOFTtribe is one of the last indigenous Ghanaian software firms still fighting the good fight.
Chinery-Hesse believes the government should do more to help local business win contracts and provide services that local business’ can utilize.
“When you help a foreign company set up in Ghana, they make money and transfer their money into dollars and ship it out of the country, which causes greater strain on the cedi,” says Chinery-Hesse.
Local business, like SOFTtribe, will keep the money within the Ghana’s borders and create more jobs for Ghanaians.
Chinery-Hesse believes Africans have the power to solve Africa’s problems. With SOFTtribe, he has proved this.

‘If We Want To Build Rockets, We Can Build Rockets’

Herman Chinery-Hesse is piloting an orange Porsche sport utility vehicle around the hairpin bends leading up a mountain to his house in Aburi, in the misty hills just outside of Accra. “Put your seat belt on,” he warns, and screeches the tires.
These days, Chinery-Hesse’s racing hobby mirrors his life in the fast lane. He is the founder and CEO of SOFTtribe Limited, a company that provides business development software to African companies. On the Accra business scene, he’s known as the “Bill Gates of Ghana”—a title the 47-year-old shrugs off. The unabashed Pan-Africanist would likely prefer a Ghanaian nickname than one borrowed from an American software developer.
<div id="attachment_343" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-343" class="size-large wp-image-343" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Bill-Gates-1024x757.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="350" />Herman Chinery-Hesse</div>
“Africa is it,” he says. “It’s the next big wave. It’s waiting for development—every place else is so saturated, and people are finally spotting it. And they’re coming to us.”
Chinery-Hesse’s goal is to ensure Africa doesn’t miss the global information technology (IT) boat. His client base includes Nestlé and Unilever, and he has a regional development partnership with Seattle-based technology pioneer Microsoft. But despite the influx of global companies coming into Africa, he says there’s not yet a homegrown technology brand name synonymous with the continent and hopes that his company, SOFTtribe, working from offices in an understated two-level house near Accra Airport, could be the first. The company has just launched what it calls a “virtual mall”: an online hub where you can buy everything from a cinema ticket to a sweater from Angola.
“We want an African Google, an African Facebook. And it’s possible,” he says.
Despite Africa’s weak technology infrastructure, Ghana, at an estimated 20%, boasts the highest penetration in the region. He sees more potential in Africa than any other technology market in the world.
“Africa is where the richest need is,” he says. “If we get even 1% or 2% of African companies to buy our products, we [will be the next] Google.
“You should be able to access Africa from wherever you are in the world,” says Chinery-Hesse, mentioning his company as being “the gateway, the highway. I want something stable that makes people money.”
At SOFTtribe’s headquarters, there’s a decidedly mellow vibe—in his trademark khakis, rubber sandals and bright button-up, Chinery-Hesse maintains the casual style of Silicon Valley. Staffers mill on the balcony and walls are adorned with large canvas paintings of the beach.
On a recent day, the boss was in his favored work position—lying down on the sofa, four computers humming on the nearby desk. He dictated to his Hong Kong-educated Ethiopian assistant as she typed on a small pink laptop.
Chinery-Hesse paused to answer calls on his wireless mobile headpiece, a confusing move that causes his colleagues to joke: “Is he still talking to me?”
The space to sprawl is an achievement for Chinery-Hesse. When he first founded SOFTtribe in 1991, its programmers sat side-by-side in an outhouse—remodelled as a cramped office—behind his parents’ house in the same neighborhood.
“We were doing an international contract with Nestlé’s head office, and we would say ‘don’t come visit’ because they wouldn’t believe that this [cutting-edge software] was coming from the bush.”
A few years later, when the team had swelled to 28 people, Chinery-Hesse, unable to afford rent on the kind of space he needed, bought a freight container and piled in his operation. It housed the entire team and two air-conditioners for six years.
Today, from the comfort of its new home, the company is expanding at a clip that rivals one of the orange Porsche’s tight turns. By providing the internet bandwidth, hosting and software development capabilities to African companies—and the regional branches of multinationals—it has amassed more than 250 clients.
Chinery-Hesse is an unabashed Africa enthusiast who hopes to use technology and the internet to aid the wide spectrum of African business, from the Ford Foundation to a craftsman in Mali looking to sell his work overseas.
“We help clients with delivery, logistics; we make sure the merchandise is working. A lot of the time, we’re dealing with ordinary folks who may just have a mobile phone. We’re hand-holding,” he says. “My team is from everywhere—here, Ethiopia, Kenya. We see Ghana as a springboard to expand further into Africa.”
He speaks from experience—his home country provided the springboard for his own ambitions.
Born in Dublin, Herman’s mother is Dr Mary Chinery-Hesse, the former deputy director general of the International Labor Organization and the vice chairman of Ghana’s National Development Planning Commission. Her son was schooled in both Ghana and the United Kingdom and attended Texas Tech University, where, with the first computer boom underway, he discovered a talent for software coding.
Ever the pragmatist, he began his professional life as an engineer at a UK plasterboard manufacturer.
“If everything went wrong, I’d have a fallback,” he says.
The pay packet from the plasterboard manufacturer helped buy a computer costing 800 British pounds, and Chinery-Hesse began tinkering with it at home. At work, bosses took note of Chinery-Hesse’s interest in technology, and his American education, and moved him from mechanical to computer engineering.
Returning home for Christmas in the late 1980s, inspiration struck in an unlikely spot – an Accra nightclub, where friends were complaining that they didn’t have jobs.
“I made a 100 pound bet that I could find a job here by Monday morning,” he says. “Monday I woke up, jobless, and said ‘ouch.’ Then I remembered I had done programming in the UK, went onto the street, found a travel agent with a broken computer, fixed it, and…”—as word of mouth spread in a society that knew next to nothing about technology—“… I was inundated with offers.” A few years later, he founded SOFTtribe.
If the company’s original hurdle was to introduce software to a nation that didn’t know what it was, today its challenge is a bit more complex—figuring out how to incorporate traditional software with the growing influence of the internet.
In a sign he’s been successfully able to navigate Web 2.0, Chinery-Hesse was invited to speak at tech conference TEDGlobal in Tanzania in 2007, where he introduced SOFTtribe’s most advanced venture, Black Star Line (BSL), an e-commerce business which coordinates trade carried out via mobile phones and the internet, a model “combining transaction brokerage and a virtual marketplace”.
Funded by an angel investor, it’s a system of technology that’s a cross between eBay and PayPal, both of which are scarce in Africa, but are booming in the US, Europe and Asia.
“Africa can’t trade with the world, hence our poverty,” he says. But before it can open its gates to the world, the tech czar would like to see a businessman in his country transact with someone in Nigeria or the Congo or Malawi—without the usual red tape. “We can use technology to bypass borders and bureaucracy and unleash inter-Africa trade,” he says, “where someone in Kenya would be able to buy something from a man in Ghana.”
SOFTtribe is being recognized globally. The TED platform was a sign of acceptance from the international tech community, as were invitations to speak at the US’s top two business schools, Wharton and Harvard, and at Cambridge in the UK.
Chinery-Hesse’s profile in Ghana continues to rise; he is currently an Assessor at Ghana’s Commercial Court and his homes—and office balcony—are more popular among Ghana’s elite than nightclubs.
On a misty September night at his weekend home in Aburi, the deck was filled with the usual motley crew—business associates, locals, friends in from London. Everyone drank good wine. Mist swirled in the distance. Someone asked about road directions, inciting a spirited discussion. Chinery-Hesse, of course, was ready with the only answer that made sense—maps, after all, are for a world before technology.
“Use GPS,” he said, and the discussion was over.

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