Meet the Bill Gates of Ghana

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In Texas, Chinery-Hesse was an outsider: an African who had little in common with the black Americans on campus but who was mockingly called "nigger" by his white friends. He shrugged off the taunts as innocent "teasing" but never felt entirely comfortable. "America is the most racist place I've ever been," he says, admitting that he often felt afraid to talk to strangers or to police. But he was also captivated by the place. "I saw open spaces where there was nothing but cows, and then four years later, it's a whole community." Everyone he knew seemed to own a ranch, and the pace of development was preternatural, with 7-Elevens and McMansions blooming spontaneously from wide-open farmland. He remembers this period as the time of his entrepreneurial conversion -- when he first understood how business might change an impoverished country. "Every aspect of underdevelopment requires a business," he says. "I realized that the opportunities were everywhere."

He returned to Accra for Christmas in 1990 and announced to his friends that he was coming home for good. The group had been partying at an Accra dance club, and Chinery-Hesse's friends responded with incredulity. They were thinking about how to get out of Ghana, not back in, and they had been badgering him all night for help in getting jobs abroad. (At the time, his mother was working as a U.N. official in Geneva.) "You guys are crazy," Chinery-Hesse responded. "The opportunities are right here."

Chinery-Hesse talked his way into a contract job with Accra's largest travel agency, whose owner was a distant relation. He was paid $2,000 to write a software program that automated the company's accounting and customer service functions. The program, which Chinery-Hesse called Gbefaloh, meaning "traveler" in Ga, his mother tongue, would eventually be adopted by travel agents throughout the country.

Soon thereafter, he joined with a high school classmate, Joe Jackson, who agreed to handle sales while Chinery-Hesse wrote code on an old PC in his childhood bedroom. Together, the pair turned the travel agency software into a sales tracking program. They charged a few thousand dollars a year for installation and technical support. SOFTtribe's first big contract, a $5,000 job to computerize a large chicken farm, led to an inventory management system that it sold to grocery stores throughout the country.

The pair developed more than 30 products and gave each an African name -- Akatua for payroll, Nzama for retail sales systems, and Bimbilla for accounting. There was also an American Idol -- like text messaging application for TV game shows and a system for managing Internet cafés. From 1994 to 2003, the company grew from two coders sharing a single computer to a team of 80 working in an office in the tony Airport Residential Area.

SOFTtribe's products were not particularly sophisticated, but simplicity can be an advantage in Ghana. During the 1990s, brownouts and blackouts occurred dozens of times an hour, making data loss a daily occurrence. While computers in the U.S. ran Windows on speedy processors, Ghanaian computers were poky, secondhand beasts that still used DOS. Chinery-Hesse's software wrote to disk constantly, safeguarding data in a power failure. And Ghana's hyperinflation meant that a typical paycheck required at least six zeros; this flummoxed most payroll and accounting programs. Chinery-Hesse's products handled all those zeros with ease.

The approach was wildly successful and quickly caught on with large multinationals doing business in Africa. A 1995 deal to develop the payroll system for Unilever, one of the largest private employers in Ghana, led to SOFTtribe's landing deals with Nestlé, Guinness, and several large agricultural concerns. "We were so arrogant," says Francois Bonin, who joined as a developer in 1996 at 20. "But we had the market cornered." By the late 1990s, SOFTtribe was running the payroll system of nearly every company in Ghana. Estimates as to the company's market share vary, but all agree that it was somewhere from 50 percent to 70 percent.

Chinery-Hesse's dominance of the Ghanaian software market made him not only rich but also something of a national hero. In 2003, the BBC's website published a profile with the improbable title "Ghana Trumps Mighty Microsoft," in which Chinery-Hesse argued that his company could compete with Silicon Valley's best and brightest. In 2005, technology journal IEEE Spectrum carried a lengthy story praising SOFTtribe's pioneering spirit: "If Africa has a sunny future, Chinery-Hesse will be a part of it," the article gushed.

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Max Chafkin

Senior writer Max Chafkin has profiled companies such as Yelp, Zappos, Twitter, Threadless, and Tesla for the magazine. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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