Lelt Student Becoming Full-Stack Web Developer & Building Apps

It was a public school teacher who first saw something in Yohannes Hussein. He was in second grade at Repi Japan School in Addis Ababa — a bright kid in a crowded classroom, with limited family resources and no obvious path forward. His teacher pulled him aside and recommended him to Lelt Foundation. That referral would change his life.

Yohannes, left, with friend Melaku at Lelt's Center. 2016.

That was 2015. Yohannes was ten years old. Today, at 21, he is a second-year IT student at Queens College and a practicing full-stack web and application developer. He has two apps in development — one for movie enthusiasts, one for his Orthodox Christian congregation — and a third project already planned for Lelt Foundation itself. His story is one of talent meeting opportunity, at exactly the right moment.

A Foundation Built on More Than Funding

When Yohannes first joined Lelt, the support was immediate and practical: financial assistance, scholastic materials, the basics that make sustained learning possible. As his academic performance stood out, Lelt invested further, enrolling him in a private school in 2017 and arranging a dedicated tutor for him and other high-potential students.

He responded by excelling. Through primary school and into secondary, his grades remained strong. But the intervention that may have mattered most came not during his regular schooling, but during a global emergency.

A Pandemic Pivot

When COVID-19 shut down schools across Ethiopia in 2020, it also accelerated something: the country’s rapid, uneven, urgent shift toward digital life. For a generation of young Ethiopians, the pandemic made clear that technology fluency was no longer optional.

Lelt responded. Our foundation opened our technology center to Yohannes and other students full-time, equipped with an instructor and structured ICT training while school was shuttered.

“My high school grades were good, and in the middle, COVID-19 erupted. When the lockdowns ended, we realized that the world was transitioning to a digital lifestyle. I became deeply passionate about coding and Lelt Foundation offered us that opportunity.”

– Yohannes Hussein

He didn’t just take the courses; he looked to expand his tech learning. Alongside his academic studies, Yohannes pursued additional online IT certifications, building toward a skill set that most students his age in Ethiopia — or anywhere — would take years longer to acquire.

Building Apps That Solve Real Problems

Yohannes’ first completed application is a film database tool, currently working under the provisional name “Movie Flix.” Built on free IMDb database links, it allows users to pull detailed information on newly released films — a tool with clear utility for entertainment journalists and film enthusiasts in a market underserved by existing platforms.

His second app is closer to his faith. Yohannes serves as a volunteer at a church in his neighborhood. For years, in the absence of hymnals, members of his congregation had been handwriting gospel songs into personal notebooks – a system that was both cumbersome and unreliable.

He built them an app which catalogs and organizes more than 2,000 spiritual songs in a mobile-friendly format, allowing users to search, edit, and add songs on the go.

“One of the core objectives of coding is to solve real-world problems. We used to write spiritual songs in our notebooks — that’s awkward and unreliable. But using this app on our phones, we can keep the songs safe, easily access them, edit or add new songs.”

– Yohannes Hussein

Next on his list: an attendance management and alert system for Lelt Foundation’s Kara Kore center — a project that would give back to the very organization that gave him his start.

“I Would Have Been on the Street”

Yohannes doesn’t speak about his life in vague terms. He is direct about what he believes would have happened without Lelt’s intervention.

“If Lelt Foundation had not provided me with this great opportunity, I would have been, for sure, on the street and smoking chat*.”

*chat is a plant similar to marijuana

It is a stark assessment. But it is also an honest one — and it reflects a reality that Lelt Foundation understands well. For children in Kara Kore and other under-served neighborhoods in Addis Ababa, the margin between trajectory and dropout can be a single teacher’s recommendation, a single scholarship, a single after-school computer lab.

When he’s not in class, Yohannes can usually be found at Lelt’s center, working on his own projects or teaching other young students in the same digital empowerment center where he got his start. He has become, in a real sense, part of the organization’s capacity — a graduate who reinvests.

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Lelt Foundation provides scholarships, academic support, and digital skills training for disadvantaged children and young adults in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. To learn more or support our work, visit leltfoundation.org/our-work