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.
Hello, Max!" Chinery-Hesse bellows as he jumps out of a Toyota Landcruiser to greet me, his face drawn wide, beaming with a gap-toothed smile. He had been sitting in the front with his driver, but after I hop in the back, he motions for me to scoot over and sidles up next to me.
As we launch into the blaring chaos of Accra's traffic, Chinery-Hesse apologizes for being more than an hour late. Then, he leans back in the seat, drapes one leg across the middle, and launches into a full-throttle sales pitch. "Africans don't need to beg," he says, speaking with the Anglo-African lilt of the upper class, which sounds like Victorian English set to music. "We need to participate in the global economy."
The Landcruiser takes us through Accra's bustling Adabraka district and toward Chinery-Hesse's offices. Accra is far wealthier than the rest of Ghana and is in the midst of a decade-long boom that has seen the population double to three million. The result is a dusty, sprawling mess; hovels made of cinder blocks and corrugated metal sit opposite modern shopping malls, and open-air textile factories can be found within a stone's throw of modern industrial operations. Walk down any street -- stepping carefully over the open sewers -- and you will see hawkers offering pretty much any good or service you can imagine: wrenches, toilet paper, cell phone parts, legal services, accounting help, cement blocks, luggage, bread, and fresh fish. Compared with a city like New York, there's a surprising lack of vagrancy. Few people have full-time jobs in the Western sense, but everyone, it seems, is in business.
This reflects an economic reality in Africa that, according to the University of Texas's Mahajan, causes companies to drastically underestimate the size of the market. The amount of business conducted informally -- in cash, on the street, and beyond the eyes of regulators -- is enormous. An oft-cited paper by Austrian economist Friedrich Schneider found that Ghana's shadow economy in 2003 was 44 percent of the country's GDP. That's an additional $3 billion beyond what the official statistics show. Mahajan thinks the number may be even bigger. "We have no idea what's happening under the carpet," he says.
Though high taxes partly explain the size of the shadow economy, the lack of a banking infrastructure is another cause. Only 10 percent of Ghanaians have bank accounts, and the economy runs strictly on cash, a fact that's obvious if you examine -- or, God help you, smell -- the currency itself. The bills are generally damp, tattered, and wrinkled, and have a vaguely organic odor. "If I want to pay my utility bill, I can't just write a check," says Patrick Awuah, the founder of Ashesi University, a private liberal arts college in Accra. "I have to drive over, stand in a long line, and pay cash -- or send a messenger." Nearly everyone who follows African business agrees that coming up with a way to exchange money effectively is the next big thing in Africa. In Kenya, a new service created by the telephone giant Vodafone allows cell phone subscribers to exchange money in the form of prepaid cell phone minutes. The service has attracted more than three million subscribers since it launched in 2007, and it is used as an acceptable form of tender in some Nairobi taxicabs. But there's still no way to transmit money between countries or even between cell phone carriers. "When somebody plays this game right, they'll walk away with billions of dollars," says Erik Hersman, a Kenya-born IT consultant based in Orlando.
