Herman Chinery-Hesse built Ghana’s oldest and largest software company and was called the “Bill Gates of Africa”.
In 1991 Herman Chinery-Hesse co-founded theSOFTtribe in Accra, an African software house that became the oldest and largest in Ghana. He died in 2024; his work lives on.
Born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1963, Herman Chinery-Hesse was educated at Ridge Church School in Accra and Mfantsipim School in Cape Coast, then at Westlake High School in Austin, Texas, and Texas State University, where he earned a degree in industrial technology.
An African software house
In 1991 he co-founded theSOFTtribe, an African software company, in Accra. It became the oldest and largest software company in Ghana. The press called him “the Bill Gates of Africa”, a nickname that followed him through his career.
His company won the Ghana Millennium Excellence Award for IT and was named Microsoft’s African Partner of the Year. He received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from Texas State University, the first African recipient, and was a TED speaker. In March 2019 he was introduced as the Commonwealth Chair for Business and Technology Initiatives for Africa.
Herman Chinery-Hesse died on 17 September 2024, aged 60. He is remembered by Ghana’s tech community as a pioneer who showed that African software could be built at home, for African problems, decades before the current boom.
