It’s 8:31 a.m. in Martino Yovo’s hometown in Lomé, Togo’s capital city. But in the United States, where he now lives, it is just past midnight and bedtime is still far off. A self-proclaimed night owl, Yovo joins our Google Meet call with a smile. As far back as 2018, Yovo was a French-speaking teen wading through language barriers to learn programming. Now a senior product engineer at Esri, the world’s leading developer of geographic information system software, Yovo is giving back through a platform democratising tech education for Francophone Africa.
Yovo’s journey began with his elder brother’s offhand remark urging him to learn how to create a website.
“My brother and I had been tech-curious, doing electronic experiments with batteries, but I don’t think he knew [what it took] to create a website when he said it,” Yovo recalls.
It was norm for his siblings to take on odd jobs to learn skills during the holidays, and his brother had suggested he learn to design websites instead. At the time, he was trying to build his first website, a clone of the University of Lomé’s website, where he was studying physical sciences. His brother did not offer a road map, just a nudge. Yovo says he borrowed his sister’s Android phone, did some research, downloaded a free notepad app from the Play Store, and set out to clone the university’s website front.
The result was rudimentary, “very ridiculous.” Yet, when he saw the skeletal outline of the front end of the webpage come to life, a strange excitement stirred inside him. In the weeks that followed, Yovo spent every spare moment reading books on programming languages: Java, Pascal, whatever he could scrounge from friends in computer science who were mostly amused by his new obsession. It was tough, Yovo recalls, as the resources, books, articles, videos, and even the programming languages were mostly in English.
Crossing a language divide
Yovo explains that in Togo, although students learn English in school, only three in a class of about 60 turn out very fluent. Learning programming already taxes the brain—logic, problem-solving, syntax—but adding language translation doubles the effort. He describes “having headaches because I was not fully understanding the documentation.”
The language barrier also affected how well people like him could interact with budding online developer communities at the time. Lomé in 2018 was no tech utopia. While the city buzzed with trade, the tech ecosystem was hardly visible. Many Togolese who had done amazing things in tech were quietly migrating abroad, not sharing their work or creating communities as is typical now, Yovo said. But he could understand spoken English, so YouTube tutorials helped his self-education, and later, he turned to Le site du Zéro, a French precursor to OpenClassrooms that offered tutorials in French.
In spite of the language challenges, Yovo continued to push through, and by 2018 scraped together 25,000 CFA francs (about $41) from a school stipend to buy a computer.
“It was one of the worst computers ever, low performance, low memory, everything was slow on that computer,” he said laughing.
Still, it functioned enough to enable him to sharpen his skills, building websites and web applications and excitedly sharing his work and learnings on social media, Facebook groups for developers, Twitter, Discord, and other platforms.
By 2019, he had become pretty active in Lomé’s nascent startup scene and was invited to build the website for one of its most popular incubators at the time. Yovo declined to name the incubator, but he says he stayed on to also help some of the participating founders build out their ideas.
“A lot of them were entrepreneurs who don’t really know tech,” he said.
He was not paid for his services, but the work pushed him to improve his skills; in that same year, he discovered mobile development, but when he tried to start learning by looking up other existing native apps, he came away from his research frustrated.
“I was searching for the best Togo apps online, and I couldn’t find one that was really great,” he recalls. He started learning Java, a cross-platform coding language, a pivot that he says changed the trajectory of his career.
His first paid gig was building mobile apps, but with no internet at home, he clocked late nights at cybercafés, where managers occasionally left the Wi-Fi running after hours. One job rolled into the next, then another, a steady stream of work building momentum in the local tech community.
Finding community and opportunity during a pandemic
Then came the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. But while the world retreated indoors, virtual doors swung open for Yovo. Hackathons, working with the United Nations development arm in Togo to build a COVID awareness platform, kept his coding skills sharp and helped him gain more online visibility in Africa’s tech ecosystem.
As he built a reputation and confidence, Yovo decided to build something he wished he had when he started learning programming, a community for his fellow Francophone developers.
By November 2020, he launched Togo Developers (TDEV) and began hosting online workshops and events with pandemic restrictions still in place. Today, the group has grown to 3,000 members across 14 countries, including non-Francophone ones.
Leaving his comfort zone
As the pandemic restrictions relaxed in 2021, Yovo started applying for international roles. He was stung by tens of rejections—including an application where the interview was cut short by a power outage. He came back to the call, after restoring the power, to find that the recruiter was gone. Yovo says he always shrugged the rejections off.
“Whenever I had a rejection, I didn’t feel rejected, but I felt like there was another chance for me to improve myself,” he says.
Among his self-development quests that year was mastering English, which he believed would improve his job prospects. Up to this point, his fluency was at a beginner level which oftentimes left him stranded in conversations. More remote gigs from the U.S. and Belgium were also coming his way.
Yovo began taking structured English classes and addressing something else that had held him back from making progress with a new language: shame.
“The course helped me get rid of this shame and be free and say, okay, I could make mistakes, but it’s pretty normal to make mistakes,” he said.
Those efforts paid off. His improved fluency aided in landing him a dollar-paying gig that improved his earnings significantly from $500 to $3,500 a month, a fortune in Togo.
“We have government officials; they don’t earn that much,” he laughed.
Beyond financial growth, Yovo has become a thought leader in Togo’s tech ecosystem. In August 2023, he became the country’s second Google Developer Expert (GDEs) in Flutter—the first is his friend.
“That was a dream come true for me,” he says, a goal sparked in 2019 when he first saw GDE chatter on Twitter.
He has participated in prestigious hackathon opportunities and events where Togo has been underrepresented. He has been appointed a judge for hackathons and a mentor in tech skill empowerment initiatives. Recently, Packt Publishing tapped him to review a textbook, ‘Flutter for Beginners,’ later naming him to their technical board. In September 2024, he attended the UN’s Summit of the Future as TDEV’s delegate and more recently, the French Embassy in Togo invited him to give a keynote about AI, Yovo said
Despite his successes in 2023, Yovo says he felt stagnant. He took stock of his life and compared it to his vision for ten years, fearing that “if I kept doing what I was doing, probably I won’t survive for the next, maybe, five years,” he said. “I was financially comfortable to have anything I wanted, but for my growth, that won’t help me.”
That year, he applied for US and Canadian visas, and in January 2024, Yovo leapt continents, arriving in the U.S. on a student visa to get a master’s degree.
Yovo now works at Esri, a geospatial leader, as a product engineer.
“I spoke at one of their biggest events, and it was huge for me,” he says of their GIS developers’ summit. It was a surreal experience because of his background.
“I built my skills in Africa,” Yovo said.
Yovo’s ambitions are bigger. He wants to create a clearer path for more French-speaking Africans to get into tech and make careers of note.
At TDEV, Yovo and his team have developed a platform that offers expert-led courses across several subject areas in French. With an AI translation tool, they’ve also been converting English language courses into French to make them more accessible.
“As a francophone African, you have to prove yourself twice because of the language barrier and I’m telling you this has been following me all over the place,” Yovo said. “That’s why we really need to create opportunities for [us] to really compete on the same level as everyone.”
