Meet the Bill Gates of Ghana

It’s just past midnight, and Herman Chinery-Hesse can’t sleep. The 43-year-old entrepreneur is lying on his back, eyes closed, mind cranking.

He’s working through the details of a pitch to American and European investors — many of whom have never backed a company like the one he’s proposing. The pitch is absurdly ambitious: a tech company that aims to reshape the business climate for small entrepreneurs in Africa while grabbing a share of the $28 billion that Africans living abroad send home every year. His start-up is a long shot, will cost millions of dollars to execute, and could take five years to get off the ground. In other words, it’s not the kind of thing you would expect from a company based in West Africa, a place known for many things — malaria, civil wars, famine — but definitely not disruptive technology companies. More