A Lelt Student Writes Code to Help His Father's Business
Lelt Foundation’s Volo Computer Lab in Kara Kore has been equipping young people with digital skills since 2018. In 2025, Lelt expanded that commitment with a new initiative in partnership with the Ethiopian government, bringing intensive web development training directly to local high school students. The third cohort of that program, forty students from Repi High School, completed their three-month course on August 31, 2026, presenting their final project work at a culminating evaluation session.
The program is tuition-free. Each student is provided with an individual computer throughout the course. Beyond web development fundamentals, the curriculum incorporates project management, teamwork, and presentation skills, preparing students not just to write code, but to deploy it toward real problems.
For one student in this cohort, that charge was personal.
A Platform Born from a Family Problem
Eshetu Abraha, 19, lives 3 kilometers from Lelt’s Karakore community center. His father is a traditional textiles weaver, and Eshetu grew up watching skilled artisans like him absorb the costs of a supply chain stacked against them. Middlemen standing between weavers and their customers have long suppressed the income that weavers actually take home, despite the high quality of their work.
When Lelt Foundation’s web development training opportunity reached Repi High School, Eshetu enrolled alongside his classmates. He knew from the beginning of the summer what he wanted to build.
His final project, a platform he called Weavers’ Link, is designed to connect traditional weavers directly with customers and delivery drivers, removing the intermediaries who erode their profits. The concept is straightforward and the need is real: a digital marketplace built specifically for Ethiopia’s handloom weaving community, giving artisans greater control over their earnings and their reach.
"This web development course helped me come up with ideas to address the issue and enhance the benefit of handloom weavers in our country. We could not have afforded to pay for problem-solving IT courses like this had it not been for the tuition-free training offered by Lelt Foundation. We were given computers individually, which boosted our confidence, and we would like to say thank you." ~ Eshetu Abraha
Eshetu was not alone in reflecting on the value of the program. Tamrawit Surafel, 18, a twelfth grader at Repi High School, spoke to the depth of engagement the training demanded and inspired.
A Growing Commitment to Digital Literacy
The web development program ran as part of Lelt Foundation’s 2026 Summer Studies Class, held under the theme “Build Skills for a Bright Future” at the Kara Kore community center. Alongside the forty web development graduates, an additional 30 youth and children completed basic computer skills training as part of the broader summer programming.
Since the high school program launched in 2025, Lelt has certified 90 students in website development through the Volo Computer Lab. The lab, which has anchored Lelt’s digital literacy work in Kara Kore since 2018, continues to provide students with access to equipment, instruction, and hands-on, project-based learning that turns technical skills into practical tools.
For students like Eshetu, the lab is more than a place to learn to code. It is a place to ask a bigger question: what problem in my community am I now able to solve?
Lelt Foundation provides tuition-free digital skills training, scholarships, and holistic support for youth and families in Kara Kore, Addis Ababa.
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