The Social Affect Accomplice Highlight collection highlights varied Cisco non-profit group companions which are serving to remodel the lives of people and communities. This weblog options Cisco’s partnership with Dwelling Items, One Acre Fund, Photo voltaic Sister, and Trickle Up, highlighting the superb work these organizations are doing to advance financial empowerment, particularly for ladies, globally.
Worldwide Ladies’s Day is widely known world wide on March 8. This 12 months’s theme, Encourage Inclusion, is a bedrock of Cisco’s Social Affect partnerships the place we intention to help an inclusive future for all — and just lately exceeded our ten-year aim to positively influence one billion individuals by 2025. As a expertise firm, we imagine within the energy of expertise to attach the unconnected, and to have influence at scale. We help our non-profit companions to ideate, iterate, and launch tech-enabled options. We offer ongoing help to assist our companions validate the influence of those options, after which take these options to scale. Our monetary help is complemented with donations of our expertise to assist our companions securely and effectively ship their packages and companies. We additionally faucet into our world worker neighborhood to supply strategic steerage and technical experience as wanted.
Study extra about 4 of Cisco’s companions – Dwelling 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 information, abilities, and assets wanted to help themselves and their households towards long-term independence, resilience, and financial safety.
Dwelling Items
“Once I began… as a neighborhood well being employee, I noticed that ladies – together with teenagers and underage women – wanted higher help to reverse the excessive maternal and little one dying charges and to flee generational cycles of dependency and poverty,” says Miriam. “It struck me how enhancing girls’s entry to info, healthcare, training, and capability to meaningfully take part in financial actions not solely modified their lives however reworked their whole households as nicely. When girls succeed, the entire neighborhood thrives.”
—Miriam Mbithe, Neighborhood Well being Employee, Dwelling Items
Over 5 million youngsters die every year because of preventable and treatable illnesses like pneumonia, diarrhea, and malaria. Sub-Saharan Africa has one of many highest little one and maternal mortality charges.
Neighborhood well being staff (CHWs) are a low-cost and high-impact well being resolution. Dwelling 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 decreasing little one mortality by 27% and little one 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 start at a well being facility, and that 95% of kids underneath the age of two had been absolutely immunized.
Dwelling Items ensures CHWs have the digital instruments, coaching, drugs, supervision, and compensation they should cost-effectively save lives at scale; they usually associate with governments to sustainably remodel how healthcare is delivered. Investing in CHWs not solely improves well being outcomes, but in addition creates alternatives for the primarily feminine CHWs to contribute to their households, native economies, and the general growth of their communities.
With Cisco’s help during the last a number of years, Dwelling Items has enhanced their digital instruments to enhance the standard and scale of neighborhood well being. Cisco has supplied help for his or her cell expertise platform, knowledge warehouse creation, predictive algorithms to focus on interventions to at-risk households, efficiency administration, and interoperability with authorities programs. Most just lately, Cisco is supporting Dwelling Items to boost their knowledge infrastructure and instruments, remodel the present knowledge structure to an improved self-service knowledge stack, and strengthen their capability to generate insights from knowledge.
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One Acre Fund
“If I hadn’t began this program, years from now there can be a distinction in how my youngsters would be capable to use this land.” —Trina Mwiinga, farmer, Zambia, One Acre Fund
One Acre Fund was based in 2006 with a easy mission: in every thing we do, we place farmers first, and we measure success in our capability to make extra farmers extra affluent. Whereas others might even see poverty in rural Africa as a permanent, intractable drawback, One Acre Fund sees a robust probability to eradicate excessive starvation and poverty by making one career radically extra productive: farming. They designed an built-in resolution that permits smallholder farmers to dramatically enhance their productiveness inside one planting season via coaching, financing, and supply of excessive quality-farming inputs. They’ve spent the previous decade working to scale as shortly as potential; at the moment, supporting greater than 4 million farmers.
One Acre Fund and Cisco started our work collectively in 2021, when Cisco supplied the early-stage funding that enabled them to launch their farmer-facing app Tupande On-line. This app presents farmers in Kenya a versatile new tech-enabled channel via which they’ll entry the One Acre Fund program. Cisco’s early help helped them to develop this initiative from the idea stage all the best way to a scaled product that has now been downloaded over 125 thousand occasions and gained the Vibrant Digital Africa Award for the Greatest Agri App in Kenya. One Acre Fund has huge plans for this app within the coming years: they intend to scale it to much more farmers in Kenya, and so as to add further farmer-facing companies similar to linkages to industrial worth chains that may supply farmers even increased costs for his or her crops.
As we speak, 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 employees are girls. This staffing selection builds distinctive gender sensitivity into all shopper interactions and mitigates inherent bias.
- To beat cultural norms which will impede girls’s employment and position in monetary decision-making, they usually ship loans and trainings to farmer teams quite than people, leveraging and reinforcing optimistic, community-centric relationships.
- To account for ladies’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 usually confronted by rural girls, the first focus of their program is on enhancing farm yields and incomes via time and labor-saving instruments, farming strategies, and crops. In consequence, girls constantly obtain the identical transformative productiveness and revenue features as male farmers in this system, in stark distinction to widespread disparities throughout the area.
Become involved:
- Make investments in small-scale farms in sub-Saharan Africa.
- Study extra about One Acre Fund’s partnership with Cisco on the Tupande farmer app in this weblog submit.
Photo voltaic Sister
“On this Ladies’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 girls all over the place to construct a brighter future. Photo voltaic Sister believes that vitality entry is a crucial catalyst for ladies’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 this planet. In addition they have among the lowest world 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 related to Photo voltaic Sister’s distinctive community-driven mannequin, they turn into the infrastructure wanted to impress communities left behind by top-down vitality funding. Photo voltaic Sister supplies enterprise teaching, mentorship, a examined product pipeline, guarantee help and entry to native Photo voltaic Sister Sisterhood teams for networking, help, and encouragement.
Photo voltaic Sister Entrepreneurs use present 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 world results of conventional vitality sources and local weather change. Alongside the best way 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 supplied 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.
Ladies in sub-Saharan Africa are 30% much less possible to personal a smartphone than males within the area. Addressing these gender gaps is necessary to ship the numerous advantages of digital instruments and the web to girls, their households, communities, and the financial system.
Photo voltaic Sister is dedicated to empowering girls and assembly our entrepreneurs the place they’re by discovering new and revolutionary methods to help them because the world turns into increasingly digitized. With Cisco’s help, 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 further modules on buyer knowledge assortment and different advertising subjects which might be rolled out in 2024.
Over the following 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 help is permitting us to develop a high-quality teaching app that’s tailored and attentive to the native atmosphere and ensures entry to constant, low-cost teaching for all Trickle Up’s individuals, 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 do not need entry to the fundamental companies that allow equal progress towards higher lives. Trickle Up’s mission is to associate with girls in excessive poverty to construct financial alternative and drive inclusion. In Trickle Up’s packages, 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 help 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 via improved digital and monetary literacy.
Utilizing the app in program supply is an revolutionary resolution to scaling Trickle Up’s work via NGO companions, permitting them to cut back teaching prices, and preserve constantly high-quality teaching. The app reduces boundaries to program adoption and supply whereas enhancing the effectiveness of teaching to enhance participant outcomes and help Trickle Up’s aim to succeed in 1 million individuals by 2030.
Trickle Up’s influence:
- 82% of Trickle Up’s individuals skilled elevated company and decision-making energy.
- 86% of Trickle Up’s individuals proceed to avoid wasting for his or her enterprise, childcare, training, and an improved high quality of life.
- 82% of Trickle Up’s individuals attain meals safety for themselves and their households.
Become involved:
- Be part of Trickle Up’s e-mail checklist and study extra about the right way to help and observe their work.
- Give at the moment: Your reward has an outsized influence on individuals residing in excessive poverty. It solely takes $250 to supply a lady the crucial 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 observe their journey.
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