Herman Kojo Chinery-Hesse

Mr. Herman Kojo Chinery-Hesse is Co-Founder and Chairman of SOFTtribe Limited. Which develops business management software and has a client base of more than 250 organisations, including several major multinationals such as the Ford Foundation, Nestle, and Unilever.

Mr. Chinery-Hessen is a software engineer by profession and is often called the Bill Gates of Ghana.

"I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I thought that was a way to develop Africa and to get wealthy," he in a BBC interview.

"I didn't have an option in America," he says. "I was a black African there; until Obama, we didn't have a track record of leadership. It would be an uphill battle, whereas in Ghana the sky was the limit. Also I'm African: we need development here and it's Africans who are going to develop Africa."

Mr. Chinery-Hessen holds a number of directorships and is an Assessor of the Commercial Court, Ghana. He has won a number of 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 first and only African recipient of the award. 

He has also been a resource person and visiting speaker at the Wharton Business School, Harvard Business School, Cambridge University, the University of Ghana, and the TEDGlobal Conference in Arusha, Tanzania, amongst others. The BBC describes Mr. Chinery-Hesse as Africa's Bill Gates. In his own words, if Africa misses the current global IT boat there may never again be an opportunity for rapid wealth creation on the continent.