Nationality: Ghanaian
Country experience:
Ghana, Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, South Africa, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Egypt, Sènégal, Ethiopia, Gambia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Tanzania, Zambia, India, and USA.
Selorm Branttie considers himself a member of the “maker movement“ in Africa, but he practices as an ICT business specialist.
Originally a land economist by training, he began to take a strong interest in ICT after a chance posting to a Ghanaian government agency exposed him to horrific levels of corruption in the land registration and administration system. The more he probed, the more he realised that ninety percent of the abuse could be curtailed by redesigning the behavioral processes in the bureaucracy, and that technology mechanisms could drive these changes more cheaply and effectively than mere political reform.
Though he did not stay long enough to see his technology-inspired vision fully realised, the rudimentary prototype he implemented without a budget was still in use a decade and half after he left the agency.
In 2005, he joined what will eventually become Ghana’s most vocal and storied civil activist and policy research organisation, IMANI, barely a year after the organisation’s founding. Selorm was also the first webmaster for Africaliberty.org, a free market online portal that was the first in Africa to disseminate ideas on free market. He went on to design and implement communications strategies for IMANI, contributing to the organization being named among the world’s top 100 think tanks by the United Nations and in the top 5 of African research institutes in consecutive years by the University of Pennsylvania.
Whilst consulting on IT initiatives for the UN and other development sector agencies, completing an MBA, supporting IMANI’s growth and working to overthrow corrupt bureaucrats in Ghana’s procurement system, he also decided to nurture another passion of his: teaching. He taught computer systems, technology and management information systems in Ghanaian universities for 7 years, supervising numerous graduate theses, and leading the implementation of large scale ERPs and CRMs for development sector initiatives. He is credited with a groundbreaking scheme to link outdoor advertising and geolotteries with philanthropic giving.
Selorm later abandoned his PhD studies and life in academia so that he could focus full-time on his work overseeing mPedigree’s stakeholder engagement management in the organisation’s expansion drive and IMANI’s bid to expand its pro-good governance advocacy and activism beyond Ghana’s shores into multiple African countries.
His most recent activities include shepherding a complex effort by COMESA (the regional political and economic union connecting East, Central and Southern Africa’s 19 countries) to overhaul its phytosanitary compliance program in order to harmonise it with the OECD regime utilising mPedigree’s Goldkeys technologies; and leading a crack investigative team to expose a procurement racket within the Ghanaian telecom regulatory sector that has cost the country more than $300 million since 2015.
Selorm sees himself as a “socially minded“ and “publicly spirited“ geek.
