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Herman Chinery-Hesse
Mr. Kojo Chinery-Hesse has been nicknamed the “Bill Gates of Africa”, an accolade he has earned by virtue of his close to two decades at the helm of Ghana's, and possibly West Africa’s largest, indigenous, technology company. The company, Softribe, now employs around 70 people and has a client base of more than 250 organisations, including major multinationals such as the Ford Foundation, Nestlé, and Unilever; it is also a Microsoft development partner in the region.
SOFTtribe has won a number of awards including the Millennium Excellence Awards for IT in 2005. The company has also been featured on BBC, CNN and the IEEE magazine in the USA, amongst others.
Mr. Kojo Chinery-Hesse is a manufacturing engineer by education but a software engineer by profession having graduated in industrial technology from Texas University, San Marcos. He holds a number of directorships and is an Assessor of the Commercial Court, Ghana. He has also won a number of personal awards including being the only African recipient of the "Distinguished Alumnus Award" from the Texas State Alumni Association and Texas State University-San Marcos, USA.
In addition to being Chairman of the Softribe, Mr. Chinery-Hesse is also the CEO of BSL, operators of the MX, carrier-agnostic, mobile-based payment platform designed to draw in poor, and/or rural, traders and producers in Africa into the global economy by bridging their cash-based commerce activities to the international electronic system using cell phones. (partly culled from the BBC website)
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