Chinery-Hesse is convinced that he will be that someone. His vision, which he sketches out for me over breakfast -- a hamburger and a cigarette at a luxury hotel in Accra -- is to create a new currency: scratch cards, like the ones used for prepaid phone service, that BSL will sell in African specialty shops in denominations worth from $5 to $1,000 in the U.S. and the United Kingdom, starting this fall. Each card will have a unique code, which can be sent to anyone in Ghana via text message. The recipient then either picks up his money at a Ghanaian post office or has it deposited directly into a bank account. The cards will be marketed and distributed by Money Systems, an Accra-based money transfer company that operates in the U.S. and Europe. "We're going to plug our customer base into what Herman is doing," says the company's founder, Kingsley Awuah-Darko, who plans to give away $5 cards to current customers to promote the new service.
Chinery-Hesse envisions a host of uses for the cards, including money transfer within Ghana and the payment of remittances by expatriate Ghanaians to their relatives back home. But the real value, he hopes, will be something he calls "micro-trade." The idea is to help Ghanaian entrepreneurs sell their products on the Web and accept payments without a computer, a website, or even a bank account. To this end, he has spent the past year recruiting dozens of local merchants -- craftspeople, clothiers, art dealers, and food companies -- whose merchandise BSL's 10 employees have been cataloging and photographing. The products will appear on ShopAfrica53.com, a website that will eventually boast products from all 53 African countries for expatriate Africans eager for a taste of home and for Westerners interested in buying directly from local merchants. So far, some 50 merchants have signed up and have agreed to pay BSL about a 10 percent commission on everything they sell.
One such merchant is Unique Ceramics Centre, a $160,000-a-year ceramics manufacturer in Accra. The factory and store are on a mud road in a rural part of town that is deserted except during rush hour, when goats and chickens make way for bumper-to-bumper traffic. As founder Happy Ideall shows me the production process, in which waist-high vases and clay drums are fed into huge wood-fired kilns, he confesses that business has been erratic. In the late 1990s, buyers from T.J. Maxx and Pier 1 Imports (NYSE:PIR) propelled his company to close to $250,000 in annual sales. But those stores fell on hard times, the dollar's value plummeted, and Unique Ceramics lost all its big accounts, forcing Ideall to lay off most of his 90 employees.
Today, the 42-year-old Ideall, with a receding hairline and a self-deprecating sense of humor, focuses on selling to local buyers and to export markets through trade shows. But trade shows, which require about a $3,000 outlay just to ship a container to the United States, are hardly risk free. Ideall tells me that at the last show he did, in Washington, D.C., there were lots of interested buyers from smaller boutiques. "People fell in love with our products, but the trouble was that the retailers wanted small quantities -- three of those or four of these," he says. Now, those small orders will be possible. They will come to Ideall via text message, and payments will be transferred directly into his bank account. "We don't have a base in the U.S., and we don't have any way to make consolidated shipments," he says. "That's why I like Herman's idea."
Two days later, I go to see another of Chinery-Hesse's partners, Mawuli Okudzeto, the founder of Mkogh, a 30-employee clothing company in central Accra. Okudzeto, a handsome, wire-thin man with a whisper of a voice, has been in business since 1984. The company sells branded T-shirts favored by young Ghanaians and a line of high-fashion apparel aimed at the upper class. The richly colored linen shirts and dresses, which cost from $50 to $150 each, are beautiful. "Perfect for the diaspora," Okudzeto says, as he shows me a large cardboard box full of pictures of American celebrities who have visited his shop over the years. There are snapshots of the rich, famous, and once-famous wearing Okudzeto's African-style gowns: Beyoncé, Jermaine Jackson, Dionne Warwick, Stevie Wonder, and Don King. Given such a robust international fan base, one would think that the company would be primed for the U.S. market. But though, like many high-end retail entrepreneurs in Ghana, Okudzeto has dabbled in the Web, he has never been able to accept online payments. If you are a well-to-do American in search of an African look, you still need to physically present yourself in Okudzeto's shop, pick out your clothes, and pay him.
In 2003, SOFTTribe received several hundred thousand dollars from an Accra investment firm, the first time a software company in Ghana had raised venture capital funding. The investors had their eyes on the big government contracts Chinery-Hesse expected to land by building a full-fledged corporate software system that would compete directly in Africa with systems offered by Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT). Eventually, Chinery-Hesse believed the company could be a global player. "We are getting to the point where a PC could run a government's entire payroll system," Chinery-Hesse says. "We expected to offer software all across West Africa. And then we started hitting a brick wall."
Chinery-Hesse miscalculated SOFTtribe's ability to lure government contracts, which tend to go to European or U.S. bidders. From 2003 to 2005, the company failed to win a single bid, pushing Chinery-Hesse into the arms of his erstwhile competitor, Microsoft, which had been looking for a Ghanaian distributor. Under the terms of a deal struck in December 2004, SOFTtribe became a Microsoft partner, selling and installing the Redmond software giant's products in Ghana and rewriting SOFTtribe's applications to work within Microsoft's enterprise software offering. The move was announced in a blockbuster press conference at which Ghana's president, joined by Microsoft's executives, praised the move as a breakthrough for the African software industry. But it left Chinery-Hesse feeling frustrated and marginalized. He had wanted SOFTtribe to become the African Microsoft; now it was an African installer of Microsoft products. "We were programmers and inventors, not consultants," he says. "I'm a geek and a gangster. Instead, we'd become corporate."
