Newswise — Herman Chinery-Hesse thinks a lot about how Africans can better their lives. And he's not alone in his conviction that his people can thrive by harnessing innovations in computing, electronics, and telecommunications. "Technology," he declares, "is on our side."
With 65 employees, his company, Soft Tribe, is a testimony to the idea that information technology can be a great equalizer for his people. The company's software--written in C++, Visual Basic, and even the ancient Clipper development language for DOS--is widespread in Ghana's capital city of Accra.
Soft Tribe's cash register program tallies the bill at Accra's largest grocery store. One of the most popular restaurants in Accra, Frankie's, uses Soft Tribe's code to manage inventory, make payroll, and pay taxes. Hotels, gold-mining companies, and Internet cafes do, too. Even a few cocoa plantations calculate their piecework pay with Soft code. Here's why: Programs from the United States and Europe are usually too expensive and require lots of memory and the latest machines to run on. Soft Tribe's programs are small enough to work with the Intel 486- and even 386-based PCs that are readily available in Ghana for as little as US$100.
"Saviors" are common in Africa, and they usually come in the form of demagogues and rebel leaders, missionaries or medical doctors, peacekeepers or refugee-camp managers. Rarely are they Birkenstock-wearing engineers or software programmers. That's why Chinery-Hesse is worth getting to know. Because if Africa has a sunny future, Chinery-Hesse will be a part of it.
He is emblematic of a little-known world of code writers, African hackers, engineers, and entrepreneurs who have chosen to live and work in their home lands, persevering against great odds and on the margins of global technological change. These code writers, often self-taught and sometimes surprisingly well paid, are creatures of the accelerating spread of the Internet, the increasing power of cheap computers, and the burgeoning global community of programmers.
The African hackers are quiet heroes, however, because they embody a side of the sub-Sahara that is entirely missed by the world's media: they represent an Africa where blacks are trying to build with their brains a better future against a backdrop of spotty electricity, rampant piracy, puny computers, and poor universities.
RSS