The Social Impression Associate Highlight collection highlights numerous Cisco non-profit group companions which might be serving to remodel the lives of people and communities. This weblog options Cisco’s partnership with Residing Items, One Acre Fund, Photo voltaic Sister, and Trickle Up, highlighting the wonderful work these organizations are doing to advance financial empowerment, particularly for girls, globally.
Worldwide Girls’s Day is widely known around the globe on March 8. This 12 months’s theme, Encourage Inclusion, is a bedrock of Cisco’s Social Impression partnerships the place we purpose to assist an inclusive future for all — and lately exceeded our ten-year aim to positively influence one billion individuals by 2025. As a know-how firm, we consider within the energy of know-how to attach the unconnected, and to have influence at scale. We assist our non-profit companions to ideate, iterate, and launch tech-enabled options. We offer ongoing assist to assist our companions validate the influence of those options, after which take these options to scale. Our monetary assist is complemented with donations of our know-how to assist our companions securely and effectively ship their applications and companies. We additionally faucet into our international worker neighborhood to offer strategic steerage and technical experience as wanted.
Be taught extra about 4 of Cisco’s companions – Residing Items, One Acre Fund, Photo voltaic Sister, and Trickle Up – who helped us attain our aim by offering individuals, particularly girls, with equitable entry to the data, expertise, and assets wanted to assist themselves and their households towards long-term independence, resilience, and financial safety.
Residing Items
“Once I began… as a neighborhood well being employee, I noticed that girls – together with teenagers and underage women – wanted higher assist to reverse the excessive maternal and baby demise charges and to flee generational cycles of dependency and poverty,” says Miriam. “It struck me how enhancing girls’s entry to info, healthcare, schooling, and capability to meaningfully take part in financial actions not solely modified their lives however remodeled their complete households as nicely. When girls succeed, the entire neighborhood thrives.”
—Miriam Mbithe, Group Well being Employee, Residing Items
Over 5 million kids die every year on account of preventable and treatable illnesses like pneumonia, diarrhea, and malaria. Sub-Saharan Africa has one of many highest baby and maternal mortality charges.
Group well being staff (CHWs) are a low-cost and high-impact well being answer. Residing Items helps greater than 11,400 digitally empowered neighborhood well being staff in Burkina Faso, Kenya, and Uganda to ship life-saving care to greater than 6 million individuals every year. Exterior research have validated that they’re lowering baby mortality by 27% and baby stunting by 7% at a value of round $2 per individual per 12 months. In 2023, CHWs additionally ensured that 95% of pregnant girls supported gave beginning at a well being facility, and that 95% of youngsters beneath the age of two had been totally immunized.
Residing Items ensures CHWs have the digital instruments, coaching, drugs, supervision, and compensation they should cost-effectively save lives at scale; and so they companion with governments to sustainably remodel how healthcare is delivered. Investing in CHWs not solely improves well being outcomes, but additionally creates alternatives for the primarily feminine CHWs to contribute to their households, native economies, and the general growth of their communities.
With Cisco’s assist over the past a number of years, Residing Items has enhanced their digital instruments to enhance the standard and scale of neighborhood well being. Cisco has offered assist for his or her cellular know-how platform, information warehouse creation, predictive algorithms to focus on interventions to at-risk households, efficiency administration, and interoperability with authorities techniques. Most lately, Cisco is supporting Residing Items to boost their information infrastructure and instruments, remodel the present information structure to an improved self-service information stack, and strengthen their means to generate insights from information.
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One Acre Fund
“If I hadn’t began this program, years from now there could be a distinction in how my kids would have the ability to use this land.” —Trina Mwiinga, farmer, Zambia, One Acre Fund
One Acre Fund was based in 2006 with a easy mission: in every part we do, we place farmers first, and we measure success in our means to make extra farmers extra affluent. Whereas others might even see poverty in rural Africa as a permanent, intractable downside, One Acre Fund sees a strong likelihood to eradicate excessive starvation and poverty by making one career radically extra productive: farming. They designed an built-in answer that permits smallholder farmers to dramatically improve their productiveness inside one planting season by way of coaching, financing, and supply of excessive quality-farming inputs. They’ve spent the previous decade working to scale as shortly as doable; immediately, supporting greater than 4 million farmers.
One Acre Fund and Cisco started our work collectively in 2021, when Cisco offered the early-stage funding that enabled them to launch their farmer-facing app Tupande On-line. This app gives farmers in Kenya a versatile new tech-enabled channel by way of which they will entry the One Acre Fund program. Cisco’s early assist helped them to develop this initiative from the idea stage all the way in which to a scaled product that has now been downloaded over 125 thousand instances and received the Vibrant Digital Africa Award for the Finest Agri App in Kenya. One Acre Fund has massive plans for this app within the coming years: they intend to scale it to much more farmers in Kenya, and so as to add extra farmer-facing companies reminiscent of linkages to industrial worth chains that can supply farmers even larger costs for his or her crops.
Right now, One Acre Fund is the world’s main group serving African smallholders. Crucially, they rigorously tailor their core program to make sure companies are accessible to girls, who make up over two thirds of the farmers with whom they work:
- For example, half of all our subject workers are girls. This staffing selection builds distinctive gender sensitivity into all consumer interactions and mitigates inherent bias.
- To beat cultural norms that will impede girls’s employment and function in monetary decision-making, they sometimes ship loans and trainings to farmer teams somewhat than people, leveraging and reinforcing optimistic, community-centric relationships.
- To account for girls’s decrease common literacy charges throughout program areas, their trainings middle on easy-to-understand hands-on demonstrations and oral and pictorial-based classes (such approaches are additionally central to increasing digital coaching choices).
- To accommodate the numerous time constraints sometimes confronted by rural girls, the first focus of their program is on bettering farm yields and incomes by way of time and labor-saving instruments, farming strategies, and crops. Consequently, girls persistently obtain the identical transformative productiveness and revenue positive aspects as male farmers in this system, in stark distinction to widespread disparities throughout the area.
Get entangled:
- Make investments in small-scale farms in sub-Saharan Africa.
- Be taught extra about One Acre Fund’s partnership with Cisco on the Tupande farmer app in this weblog publish.
Photo voltaic Sister
“On this Girls’s Worldwide Day, we have fun the resilience of our Photo voltaic Sister Entrepreneurs and the a number of underserved communities these girls remodel throughout Africa. By fostering inclusion and offering alternatives, we unlock the potential of ladies in every single place to construct a brighter future. Photo voltaic Sister believes that vitality entry is a essential catalyst for girls’s financial empowerment.”
—Olasimbo Sojinrin, COO, Photo voltaic Sister
The communities the place Photo voltaic Sister works in sub-Saharan Africa have among the biggest gender fairness disparities on the earth. Additionally they have among the lowest international electrification charges and are additionally bearing the brunt of a altering local weather – 774 million individuals globally lack entry to vitality, with 597 million of these people residing in sub-Saharan Africa.
When girls in these last-mile communities are linked to Photo voltaic Sister’s distinctive community-driven mannequin, they change into the infrastructure wanted to affect communities left behind by top-down vitality funding. Photo voltaic Sister gives enterprise teaching, mentorship, a examined product pipeline, guarantee assist and entry to native Photo voltaic Sister Sisterhood teams for networking, assist, and encouragement.
Photo voltaic Sister Entrepreneurs use current woman-to-woman social networks to construct their companies and supply their communities entry to reasonably priced, clear vitality. These merchandise mitigate the destructive native and international results of conventional vitality sources and local weather change. Alongside the way in which they elevate their very own standing, spend money on their households and neighborhoods, and assist usher their communities into an electrified future.
Up to now, Photo voltaic Sister has offered greater than 4.5 million individuals with clear vitality by coaching and supporting greater than 10,000 girls entrepreneurs who’ve gone on to mitigate 1.4M CO2e emissions. throughout Nigeria, Tanzania, and Kenya.
Girls in sub-Saharan Africa are 30% much less seemingly to personal a smartphone than males within the area. Addressing these gender gaps is vital to ship the numerous advantages of digital instruments and the web to girls, their households, communities, and the economic system.
Photo voltaic Sister is dedicated to empowering girls and assembly our entrepreneurs the place they’re by discovering new and revolutionary methods to assist them because the world turns into an increasing number of digitized. With Cisco’s assist, Photo voltaic Sister launched a brand new digital literacy curriculum, consisting of a number of modules on subjects associated to social media advertising and digital enterprise instruments. Up to now, they’ve delivered this preliminary coaching to over 400 entrepreneurs and developed extra modules on buyer information assortment and different advertising subjects which shall be rolled out in 2024.
Over the subsequent 5 years, Photo voltaic Sister goals to scale their mannequin throughout Africa to empower greater than 30,000 girls to start out clear vitality companies and create significant influence of their communities and supply greater than 30,000,000 individuals with entry to wash vitality options.
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Trickle Up
“Cisco’s assist is permitting us to develop a high-quality teaching app that’s tailored and conscious of the native setting and ensures entry to constant, low-cost teaching for all Trickle Up’s members, permitting them to forge sustainable pathways out of poverty.” —Nathalie Laidler-Kylander, President & CEO, Trickle Up
650 million individuals globally survive on lower than $2.15/day and wouldn’t have entry to the essential companies that allow equal progress towards higher lives. Trickle Up’s mission is to companion with girls in excessive poverty to construct financial alternative and drive inclusion. In Trickle Up’s applications, girls and extremely susceptible populations forge resilient pathways out of poverty by beginning microenterprises and constructing livelihoods. Particular person and group teaching are core elements of success in financial inclusion programming.
Cisco’s assist has enabled the creation and testing of Trickle Up’s open-source Echb’enink teaching app with 12 modules, obtainable for anybody to make use of. The partnership with Cisco to create train-the-trainer assets and movies helps girls’s monetary inclusion and company by way of improved digital and monetary literacy.
Utilizing the app in program supply is an revolutionary answer to scaling Trickle Up’s work by way of NGO companions, permitting them to cut back teaching prices, and preserve persistently high-quality teaching. The app reduces limitations to program adoption and supply whereas enhancing the effectiveness of teaching to enhance participant outcomes and assist Trickle Up’s aim to achieve 1 million members by 2030.
Trickle Up’s influence:
- 82% of Trickle Up’s members skilled elevated company and decision-making energy.
- 86% of Trickle Up’s members proceed to avoid wasting for his or her enterprise, childcare, schooling, and an improved high quality of life.
- 82% of Trickle Up’s members attain meals safety for themselves and their households.
Get entangled:
- Be part of Trickle Up’s e mail record and study extra about the way to assist and comply with their work.
- Give immediately: Your present has an outsized influence on individuals residing in excessive poverty. It solely takes $250 to offer a girl the essential seed capital she must jumpstart her microenterprise.
- Observe Trickle Up on social media: Be part of their on-line neighborhood to continue to learn extra about Trickle Up’s work, hear from the ladies with whom they work, and comply with their journey.
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