Founder and Chairman of SoFTribe, and one of Ghana’s foremost tech experts, Herman Kojo Chinery-Hesse has died at age 61.
Herman Kojo Chinery-Hesse, once described by the BBC as “The Bill Gates of Africa” has, for several years now, been living and working in Sierra Leone where he passed on.
He founded SOFTtribe, the oldest and largest software company in Ghana and West Africa.
Herman Chinery-Hessen is a software engineer by profession, born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1963 to Lebrecht James Nii Tettey Chinery-Hesse and Mary Chinery-Hesse, née Blay.
He was educated at the Mfantsipim School in Cape Coast, Westlake High School in Austin, Texas, and the Texas State University, from where he graduated with a Bachelor of Science Degree in Industrial Technology.
Career
In 1991, Herman co-founded theSOFTtribe, one of the leading software houses in Africa. Over the years, the company has pioneered a number of ground-breaking products in the following areas:
- Hei Julor!!! a low-cost, mobile-based, mass market community security alert system for Africa
- Government payroll systems
- ERP systems
- Nationwide utility billing systems
- Point of sale systems
- Electronic payment systems
His project “African Echoes” is aimed at creating African audio books for global consumption, such that for the first time ever Africans are in a position to tell their own stories to a worldwide audience. He is an assessor for the Commercial Courts of Ghana.
Honours and recognition
He has won several personal awards including Outstanding Ghanaian Professional from the GPA Awards (UK), as well as the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Texas State Alumni Association and Texas State University-San Marcos (USA) – the only African recipient of the award.
Herman also made the list of 15 Black STEM Innovators. In March 2019, he was introduced as the Commonwealth Chair for Business and Technology Initiatives for Africa. He was named one of “20 Notable Black Innovators in Technology”, one of Africa’s “Top 20 Tech Influencers”, among the 2Top 100 Most Influential Africans of our Time”, and one of the “Top 100 Global Thinkers” by Foreign Policy Magazine.
He has been a speaker at many prestigious institutions including the University of Oxford, Harvard Business School, Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Chatham House and Tech4Africa. He has also played a supporting role in the realm of technology and innovation to many Ghanaian presidents in their international engagements. He is a TED Fellow and has featured heavily in the international media’s reportage on technology in Africa, including CNN, BBC and Al Jazeera, and in publications such as the Ghana Business & Finance Times, The Guardian, Forbes Africa, New African, IEEE Magazine, The Financial Times, among many others.
