From Dropout to Developer: Emeka's Story

Emeka Nkwenti was 17 when he stopped going to school. Not because he wanted to — but because the fees had become impossible, and the path forward had become invisible. He spent eight months doing odd jobs in Yaoundé's Ngousso neighbourhood, watching his peers drift toward choices he did not want to make.

That changed when a community outreach worker from the Battiston Lyonga Foundation knocked on his door. The Youth Development programme was recruiting its third cohort, and Emeka's name had come up in conversations with local leaders who had noticed his quiet intelligence.

"I almost didn't go to the first session," Emeka recalls. "I thought it was going to be another talk about staying off the streets. I had heard those talks before."

“Nobody had ever told me I was capable of building something. The programme was the first place where someone looked at me and said: you can do this.”

What he found instead was a structured programme built around skills, mentorship, and genuine investment in his future. In the first three months, he was introduced to digital literacy — basic computing, internet navigation, and eventually, introductory coding through a partnership with a Cameroonian tech training organisation.

The transformation was not instant. There were weeks when Emeka struggled, when the concepts felt too abstract, when the gap between where he was and where he wanted to be felt unbridgeable. His mentor, a software engineer from Douala who volunteered with the programme, sat with him through those moments.

"Nobody had ever told me I was capable of building something," Emeka says. "The programme was the first place where someone looked at me and said: you can do this."

By the end of his first year, Emeka had completed a basic web development course and built a simple inventory management tool for a local shop owner — his first real-world project. By the end of his second year, he had developed a mobile application for tracking community health worker visits, which is now being piloted by the Foundation's Rural Healthcare programme.

Today, Emeka is 20. He is employed part-time by a Yaoundé-based tech startup, earning a salary that supports his family. He has also returned to the Youth Development programme — not as a participant, but as a junior mentor, working with the current cohort of young people who remind him of himself three years ago.

"I tell them what nobody told me," he says. "That the gap between where you are and where you want to be is smaller than it looks. You just have to start."

Emeka's story is one of 200 that the Foundation's Youth Development programme has generated since 2017. Not all of them end with a tech job. But all of them begin with the same thing: someone deciding to show up, and a programme deciding to show up for them.