Keynote speaker BarCamp Ghana 08 - Herman Chinery-Hesse

Herman Chinery-Hesse will be a keynote speaker at BarCamp Ghana 08. As one of the most prominent leaders of the technology sector in Ghana and Africa as a whole, and a TED Global Fellow, we are pleased to have him.

Herman Chinery-Hesse is the CEO of Soft Tribe Ghana Limited and the BBC has described Herman as Africa's "Bill Gates". He was born in Dublin, and went to college in the United States.

Herman 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.

His company, TheSOFTtribe (earlier known as SOFT) writes software, and sells computer code to hundreds of businesses in Ghana. The company also supplies accounting software for small and medium-size businesses, such as stores and restaurants. Herman calls his africanized code "tropically tolerant.

The company has a client base of over 250 organisations, including major multinationals such as the Ford Foundation, Nestlé, and Unilever; it is also a Microsoft development partner in the region. TheSOFTtribe has also 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.

Herman is launching a new service called BSL, a hybrid of Paypal and Amazon.com which will let African entrepreneurs easily sell their products online and accept payments via mobile phone.

Photo credit - White African