About Dino Yemane and Fidel Family
Heritage-language tools, built by one engineer for every diaspora family.
Dino Yemane
Dino Yemane is an Eritrean-American software engineer and the founder of Fidel Family. He builds tools to help diaspora children learn Tigrinya, Amharic, English, and Oromo — and to help their parents teach the heritage languages they grew up speaking.
Fidel Family began as a personal project: a way to ensure that the children of the Eritrean and Ethiopian diaspora grow up able to read what their grandparents wrote. It launched as a free, ad-free, privacy-first learning environment for ages 1–5. Today the project includes a web learning app, a mobile app, an admin and authoring platform, a children's bookstore with print-on-demand fulfillment, and a public content API used across the apps.
Outside Fidel Family, Dino writes and ships at madein.place.
About Fidel Family
Fidel Family is a free language-learning app for children. It teaches the Ge'ez alphabet (fidel), vocabulary packs, illustrated picture books, and children's songs in four languages: Tigrinya, Amharic, English, and Oromo.
The mission is simple: every Habesha child in the diaspora should be able to read their grandparents' birthday cards in the original script. The app is built in collaboration with native Tigrinya and Amharic speakers from Eritrea, Ethiopia, and the global diaspora.
Fidel Family is free, has no advertising, collects no personal data from children, and works offline.
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Corrections, additions, and family-specific contributions to the guides are welcome. Heritage-language teaching is a community project, and the work improves with input from the families who use it.
“The fidel alphabet has been continuously written, read, and taught for more than 1,600 years. Every fidel-literate child is one more person who can read what their grandparents wrote.”