The Social Affect Companion Highlight collection highlights numerous Cisco non-profit group companions which might be serving to rework 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 superb work these organizations are doing to advance financial empowerment, particularly for girls, globally.

Worldwide Girls’s Day is widely known world wide on March 8. This yr’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 lately exceeded our ten-year objective to positively affect one billion folks by 2025. As a know-how firm, we consider within the energy of know-how to attach the unconnected, and to have affect 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 affect of those options, after which take these options to scale. Our monetary help is complemented with donations of our know-how to assist our companions securely and effectively ship their packages and companies. We additionally faucet into our international worker group to supply strategic steering 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 objective by offering folks, particularly ladies, with equitable entry to the information, abilities, and assets wanted to help themselves and their households towards long-term independence, resilience, and financial safety.

Residing Items

“Once I began… as a group well being employee, I noticed that girls – together with teenagers and underage women – wanted higher help to reverse the excessive maternal and youngster dying charges and to flee generational cycles of dependency and poverty,” says Miriam. “It struck me how enhancing ladies’s entry to data, healthcare, training, and capability to meaningfully take part in financial actions not solely modified their lives however remodeled their complete households as properly. When ladies succeed, the entire group thrives.”
—Miriam Mbithe, Group Well being Employee, Residing Items

Over 5 million youngsters die every year because of preventable and treatable ailments like pneumonia, diarrhea, and malaria. Sub-Saharan Africa has one of many highest youngster and maternal mortality charges.

Group well being employees (CHWs) are a low-cost and high-impact well being resolution. Residing Items helps greater than 11,400 digitally empowered group well being employees in Burkina Faso, Kenya, and Uganda to ship life-saving care to greater than 6 million folks every year.  Exterior research have validated that they’re decreasing youngster mortality by 27% and youngster stunting by 7% at a value of round $2 per particular person per yr. In 2023, CHWs additionally ensured that 95% of pregnant ladies supported gave start at a well being facility, and that 95% of kids beneath the age of two had been totally immunized.

Residing Items ensures CHWs have the digital instruments, coaching, medication, supervision, and compensation they should cost-effectively save lives at scale; and so they companion with governments to sustainably rework 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 improvement of their communities.

With Cisco’s help over the past a number of years, Residing Items has enhanced their digital instruments to enhance the standard and scale of group well being. Cisco has supplied help for his or her cellular know-how platform, knowledge 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 knowledge infrastructure and instruments, rework the present knowledge structure to an improved self-service knowledge stack, and strengthen their capability to generate insights from knowledge.

Become involved:

One Acre Fund

“If I hadn’t began this program, years from now there can be a distinction in how my youngsters 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 capability to make extra farmers extra affluent. Whereas others may even see poverty in rural Africa as an everlasting, intractable drawback, One Acre Fund sees a robust likelihood 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 improve their productiveness inside one planting season by coaching, financing, and supply of excessive quality-farming inputs. They’ve spent the previous decade working to scale as shortly as doable; right this 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 affords farmers in Kenya a versatile new tech-enabled channel by which they will 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 instances and received the Vibrant Digital Africa Award for the Finest 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 akin to linkages to industrial worth chains that may supply farmers even increased costs for his or her crops.

Right this moment, One Acre Fund is the world’s main group serving African smallholders. Crucially, they fastidiously tailor their core program to make sure companies are accessible to ladies, who make up over two thirds of the farmers with whom they work:

• For example, half of all our area workers are ladies. This staffing alternative builds distinctive gender sensitivity into all shopper interactions and mitigates inherent bias.
• To beat cultural norms which will impede ladies’s employment and function in monetary decision-making, they sometimes ship loans and trainings to farmer teams somewhat than people, leveraging and reinforcing constructive, 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 ladies, the first focus of their program is on bettering farm yields and incomes by time and labor-saving instruments, farming strategies, and crops. Consequently, ladies constantly obtain the identical transformative productiveness and revenue beneficial properties 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.
• Be taught extra about One Acre Fund’s partnership with Cisco on the Tupande farmer app in this weblog put up.

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 ladies rework throughout Africa. By fostering inclusion and offering alternatives, we unlock the potential of ladies all over the place to construct a brighter future. Photo voltaic Sister believes that power entry is a vital 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 a few of the biggest gender fairness disparities on the planet. In addition they have a few of the lowest international electrification charges and are additionally bearing the brunt of a altering local weather – 774 million folks globally lack entry to power, with 597 million of these people dwelling in sub-Saharan Africa.

When ladies in these last-mile communities are linked to Photo voltaic Sister’s distinctive community-driven mannequin, they turn into the infrastructure wanted to impress communities left behind by top-down power funding. Photo voltaic Sister offers 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 inexpensive, clear power. These merchandise mitigate the detrimental native and international results of conventional power sources and local weather change. Alongside the best way they elevate their very own standing, put money into their households and neighborhoods, and assist usher their communities into an electrified future.

So far, Photo voltaic Sister has supplied greater than 4.5 million folks with clear power by coaching and supporting greater than 10,000 ladies 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 necessary to ship the numerous advantages of digital instruments and the web to ladies, their households, communities, and the financial system.

Photo voltaic Sister is dedicated to empowering ladies and assembly our entrepreneurs the place they’re by discovering new and revolutionary methods to help them because the world turns into an increasing number of 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. So far, 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 subsequent 5 years, Photo voltaic Sister goals to scale their mannequin throughout Africa to empower greater than 30,000 ladies to begin clear power companies and create significant affect of their communities and supply greater than 30,000,000 folks with entry to scrub power options.

Become involved:

Trickle Up

“Cisco’s help is permitting us to develop a high-quality teaching app that’s tailored and conscious of the native surroundings 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 folks globally survive on lower than $2.15/day and don’t have entry to the essential companies that allow equal progress towards higher lives. Trickle Up’s mission is to companion with ladies in excessive poverty to construct financial alternative and drive inclusion. In Trickle Up’s packages, ladies and extremely weak populations forge resilient pathways out of poverty by beginning microenterprises and constructing livelihoods. Particular person and group teaching are core parts 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 ladies’s monetary inclusion and company by improved digital and monetary literacy.

Utilizing the app in program supply is an revolutionary resolution to scaling Trickle Up’s work by NGO companions, permitting them to cut back teaching prices, and preserve constantly high-quality teaching. The app reduces obstacles to program adoption and supply whereas enhancing the effectiveness of teaching to enhance participant outcomes and help Trickle Up’s objective to succeed in 1 million individuals by 2030.

Trickle Up’s affect:

• 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 a part of Trickle Up’s electronic mail record and study extra about methods to help and comply with their work.
• Give right this moment: Your present has an outsized affect on folks dwelling in excessive poverty. It solely takes $250 to supply a girl the vital seed capital she must jumpstart her microenterprise.
• Comply with Trickle Up on social media: Be a part of their on-line group 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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