The Social Affect Accomplice Highlight sequence highlights numerous Cisco non-profit group companions which can 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 wonderful work these organizations are doing to advance financial empowerment, particularly for girls, globally.
Worldwide Ladies’s Day is well known all over the world 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 purpose to positively affect one billion individuals by 2025. As a know-how firm, we imagine 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 applications and companies. We additionally faucet into our world worker group 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 purpose by offering individuals, particularly girls, with equitable entry to the information, expertise, and assets wanted to help themselves and their households towards long-term independence, resilience, and financial safety.
Residing Items
“After 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 baby loss of life charges and to flee generational cycles of dependency and poverty,” says Miriam. “It struck me how enhancing girls’s entry to data, healthcare, schooling, and capability to meaningfully take part in financial actions not solely modified their lives however reworked their complete households as nicely. When girls succeed, the complete group thrives.”
—Miriam Mbithe, Group Well being Employee, Residing Items
Over 5 million youngsters die every year on account of preventable and treatable ailments like pneumonia, diarrhea, and malaria. Sub-Saharan Africa has one of many highest baby 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 individuals every year. Exterior research have validated that they’re decreasing baby mortality by 27% and baby stunting by 7% at a value of round $2 per particular person per yr. In 2023, CHWs additionally ensured that 95% of pregnant girls supported gave delivery at a well being facility, and that 95% of kids beneath the age of two had been absolutely immunized.
Residing 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 rework 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, Residing Items has enhanced their digital instruments to enhance the standard and scale of group well being. Cisco has offered help for his or her cell know-how platform, information warehouse creation, predictive algorithms to focus on interventions to at-risk households, efficiency administration, and interoperability with authorities methods. Most lately, Cisco is supporting Residing Items to reinforce their information infrastructure and instruments, rework the present information structure to an improved self-service information stack, and strengthen their potential to generate insights from information.
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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 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 little thing we do, we place farmers first, and we measure success in our potential 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 resolution that allows smallholder farmers to dramatically enhance 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 attainable; 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 provides farmers in Kenya a versatile new tech-enabled channel by way of 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 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 akin to linkages to industrial worth chains that may provide farmers even larger costs for his or her crops.
As we speak, 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 girls, who make up over two thirds of the farmers with whom they work:
- For example, half of all our area 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 position in monetary decision-making, they usually ship loans and trainings to farmer teams reasonably 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 usually confronted by rural girls, the first focus of their program is on enhancing farm yields and incomes by way of 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.
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 put up.
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 rework 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 a few of the biggest gender fairness disparities on the earth. Additionally they have a few of 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 grow to be 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 help and entry to native Photo voltaic Sister Sisterhood teams for networking, help, and encouragement.
Photo voltaic Sister Entrepreneurs use current woman-to-woman social networks to construct their companies and supply their communities entry to inexpensive, clear vitality. These merchandise mitigate the detrimental native and world 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.
To this point, 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.
Ladies in sub-Saharan Africa are 30% much less possible 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 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 marketing and digital enterprise instruments. To this point, they’ve delivered this preliminary coaching to over 400 entrepreneurs and developed extra modules on buyer information assortment and different advertising and marketing 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 affect of their communities and supply greater than 30,000,000 individuals with entry to scrub 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 conscious of 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 wouldn’t have 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 applications, girls 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, accessible 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 resolution to scaling Trickle Up’s work by way of NGO companions, permitting them to scale 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 purpose 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 save lots of for his or her enterprise, childcare, schooling, and an improved high quality of life.
- 82% of Trickle Up’s individuals attain meals safety for themselves and their households.
Get entangled:
- Be part of Trickle Up’s e mail record and be taught extra about methods to help and comply with their work.
- Give immediately: Your present has an outsized affect on individuals residing in excessive poverty. It solely takes $250 to offer a lady the essential seed capital she must jumpstart her microenterprise.
- Observe Trickle Up on social media: Be part of their on-line group to continue learning extra about Trickle Up’s work, hear from the ladies with whom they work, and comply with their journey.
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