Herman Chinery-Hesse

Herman Chinery-Hesse was born in Dublin in 1963 to Lebrecht James Nii Tettey Chinery-Hesse and Mary Chinery-Hesse, née Blay.[7] His maternal grandfather was Robert Samuel Blay, a barrister and Justice of the Supreme Court of Ghana in the First Republic. He was the first Vice President of the UGCC, of which he was a founding member and a Speaker of the 1969 Constituent Assembly.

Chinery-Hesse was educated at the Mfantsipim School in Cape Coast, Westlake High School in Austin, Texas, and the Texas State University, from where he graduated with a Bachelor of Science Degree in Industrial Technology.[8]

In 1991, Herman co-founded theSOFTtribe Ltd, one of the leading software houses in Africa. Over the years, the company has pioneered a number of groundbreaking products in the following areas:

• Hei Julor!!! a low-cost, mobile-based, mass market community security alert system for Africa
• Government payroll systems
• ERP systems
• Nationwide utility billing systems
• Point of sale systems
• Electronic payment systems

His project "African Echoes" is aimed at creating African audiobooks for global consumption, such that for the first time ever Africans are in a position to tell their own stories to a worldwide audience.[9] He is an assessor for the Commercial Courts of Ghana.[10]

He and his company have won numerous awards and accolades, including the GUBA award in the UK for Exceptional Achievement, the Ghana Millennium Excellence Award for IT, the Ghana Club 100 Award for the Most Innovative Company, the "SMS" App of the Year Award, the Mobile World Lifetime Achievement Award and the Best Entrepreneur in Information and Communication Technology. He also won the Distinguished Alumnus Award from Texas State University, the first and currently only African recipient of the award.

Chinery-Hesse has been a speaker at many prestigious institutions including Oxford University, Harvard Business School, Wharton Business School, Chatham House and Tech4Africa. He has also played a supporting role in the realm of technology and innovation to many Ghanaian presidents in their international engagements. He is a TED Fellow and has featured heavily in the international media's reportage on technology in Africa, including CNN, BBC and Al Jazeera, and publications such as the Ghana Business & Finance Times, Forbes, Inc Magazine, New African Magazine, IEEE Magazine, The Guardian, The Financial Times and many others.

He was named one of 20 Notable Black Innovators in Technology, one of Africa’s Top 20 Tech Influencers, among the top 100 Most Influential Africans of our time, and one of the top 100 Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy Magazine.