In 1990, Ghana’s economy and politics were on the cusp of a turnaround. Dominated for years by coups and military heads of state, the West African nation was heading into an era of democratic elections and privately created wealth.
It was also the year Herman Chinery-Hesse came home to Accra, the capital, from studying in Texas. Surprising friends, he decided to stay put. He started programming software in his childhood bedroom and obtained a contract to digitize the inventory of a chicken farm for $5,000. Twenty years later, people were calling him “The Bill Gates of Ghana” (or of all of Africa, depending whom you ask).
Sort of The Bill Gates of Africa
The moniker “is quite embarrassing, actually,” he said one afternoon, speaking to AFKInsider by phone. “I don’t call myself that.”
Others do because Chinery-Hesse was among the first to see Ghana as a market and not a charity. Now he acts as the unofficial global spokesman of the country’s information and communication technology industry. He jets around like a diplomat, spreading the word.
November 8, he landed in Addis Ababa for the Africa Media Leaders Forum, where he stood on stage with Bono. “The world,” Bono said, “is waking up to how extraordinarily wealthy the continent of Africa is in terms of its people, not just its resources.” Days later, Chinery-Hesse was in London accepting a Ghana-U.K. Based Achievement award for “exceptional achievement.”
His exceptional achievement in 1991 was to build a software company in a country where, according to an exhaustive Inc. profile of Chinery-Hesse from 2008, most of the few computers in Ghana were Frankenstein or hand-me-down PCs running disk operating systems. His exceptional achievement now is that even though the tech landscape is dramatically different than it was when he started, his company, SOFTtribe, remains the industry backbone. Arguably, the same could not be said for Gates’ Microsoft.
Young entrepreneurs, toddlers when SOFTtribe was founded, hold Chinery-Hesse up as an icon or a proof of principle. Talent doesn’t have to leave for London or San Francisco. Creativity can work here.
“I think he’s a fantastic entrepreneur, and he has paved the way for many young entrepreneurs like myself to have the courage to start our own technology companies,” said Kane Mani, the 25-year-old founder and CEO of Origgin, a Ghana-based mobile app developer.
The software systems for payroll and inventory that SOFTtribe builds for businesses are still the foundation of Chinery-Hesse’s enterprise. But his gaze is elsewhere.
Identifying Ghana’s Tech Needs
Ghana has more cell phones than Australia does. In a nation of about 25 million people there are nearly 26 million mobile phones, and 1.3 million people are online, according to the Central Intelligence Agency. The tech market isn’t a few big companies in a few big cities anymore; it’s everywhere in Africa.
That’s tech demand on a Western scale — but the needs are different. Ghanaians aren’t looking for the next Angry Birds for their iPhone 5. They want tools like banking, communications and news.
“We use technology to solve African problems,” Chinery-Hesse said.
The Crime and Theft Tech Solution
One of those is security. Police aren’t always handy in some parts of the country, and the U.S. State Department says crimes of opportunity, like theft and burglary, are the biggest threats.
“Perpetrators generally lack the sophistication required to overcome home alarm systems,” the U.S. State Department said in a Ghana 2013 Crime and Safety Report. Technological sophistication however, is something many Ghanaians can’t afford.
Here was Chinery-Hesse’s opening. Last year SOFTtribe launched the emergency alert system Hei-Julor!!! “For $10 a month,” he said, “if your house gets robbed or somebody tries to rob your house, there will be five telephones in the house that call our number.”
From there a central system puts out the alarm: all your neighbors get a phone call, several of your friends, “we alert our radio station partners,” Chinery-Hesse explained noting that the stations broadcast the fact that a robbery is taking place.
The system also calls the police and a private security company, contracted for this purpose, who each eventually respond. “Four men and a dog in a van will also come,” he said, only half joking.
For good measure, your $10 subscription also entitles you to $8,000 worth of insurance if anything does get stolen. Highly unlikely, Chinery-Hesse said.
“Young men in the area with sticks and stones, guns shooting off — you can’t rob,” he continued. “You’d be lynched.” He said Ghana is the “test pilot” but plans to expand the service across Africa.
The price is low enough that he believes it will work, but he said companies working in Africa don’t yet have the luxury of consumer disposable income. The per capita GDP has grown to $3,400, but is still among the lowest in the world.
“If I’m going to take $10 from everybody every month, I better have a damn good excuse,” Chinery-Hesse said.
Black Star Line: The Ebay of Africa
Another project he’s working on that could help create more wealth is called BSL, for Black Star Line. Chinery-Hesse describes it as the eBay of Africa, an online marketplace for geographically isolated Africans to participate in global commerce alongside everyone else. Farmers could derive significant new income from the art, shea butter, furniture and fruit they’ve been growing and perfecting for years.
“Excuse me, you have a parcel from Africa, please sign here,” Chinery-Hesse said. “That’s never happened before.” Despite the Bill Gates comparisons, he calls this Ghana’s Henry Ford era. “If you look at the U.S. in the 1880s, that’s where Ghana is now.”
But the pace of success of companies like SOFTtribe, Accra’s Ashesi University and other start-ups “is encouraging more investors to come to Ghana,” Prince Baah-Duodu, who runs a tech blog called Cranchon, said via email.” Already, many start-ups in Ghana have started receiving grants and investment from even Silicon Valley.”
Mani, the app developer at Origgin, says he left film school to join the tech boom. He calls himself and his 10 employees “pioneers.”
“I think ICT” — information and communication technology — “is going to catapult Africa,” he says.