The Social Influence 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 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 girls, globally.
Worldwide Ladies’s Day is widely known all over the world on March 8. This yr’s theme, Encourage Inclusion, is a bedrock of Cisco’s Social Influence partnerships the place we purpose to assist an inclusive future for all — and not too long ago exceeded our ten-year aim 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 assist our non-profit companions to ideate, iterate, and launch tech-enabled options. We offer ongoing assist to assist our companions validate the affect 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 providers. We additionally faucet into our world worker group to offer strategic steering 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 ladies, with equitable entry to the data, expertise, and assets wanted to assist themselves and their households towards long-term independence, resilience, and financial safety.
Dwelling Items
“After I began… as a group well being employee, I noticed that ladies – together with teenagers and underage women – wanted higher assist to reverse the excessive maternal and youngster demise charges and to flee generational cycles of dependency and poverty,” says Miriam. “It struck me how enhancing ladies’s entry to info, healthcare, training, and capability to meaningfully take part in financial actions not solely modified their lives however remodeled their complete households as nicely. When ladies succeed, the entire group thrives.”
—Miriam Mbithe, Neighborhood Well being Employee, Dwelling 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.
Neighborhood well being staff (CHWs) are a low-cost and high-impact well being resolution. Dwelling Items helps greater than 11,400 digitally empowered group 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 youngster mortality by 27% and youngster stunting by 7% at a value of round $2 per individual per yr. In 2023, CHWs additionally ensured that 95% of pregnant ladies supported gave beginning at a well being facility, and that 95% of youngsters below 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 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 during the last a number of years, Dwelling Items has enhanced their digital instruments to enhance the standard and scale of group well being. Cisco has supplied 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 methods. Most not too long ago, Cisco is supporting Dwelling Items to boost their information infrastructure and instruments, remodel the present information structure to an improved self-service information stack, and strengthen their capacity 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 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 all the pieces we do, we place farmers first, and we measure success in our capacity 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 strong probability 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 coaching, financing, and supply of excessive quality-farming inputs. They’ve spent the previous decade working to scale as rapidly as doable; 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 gives farmers in Kenya a versatile new tech-enabled channel by 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 best way to a scaled product that has now been downloaded over 125 thousand instances and received 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 extra farmer-facing providers equivalent to linkages to business worth chains that may supply farmers even increased costs for his or her crops.
At present, One Acre Fund is the world’s main group serving African smallholders. Crucially, they rigorously tailor their core program to make sure providers are accessible to ladies, who make up over two thirds of the farmers with whom they work:
- For example, half of all our discipline employees 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 fairly than people, leveraging and reinforcing constructive, community-centric relationships.
- To account for girls’s decrease common literacy charges throughout program areas, their trainings heart 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 enhancing farm yields and incomes by time and labor-saving instruments, farming strategies, and crops. Consequently, ladies constantly obtain the identical transformative productiveness and revenue positive aspects 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 rejoice the resilience of our Photo voltaic Sister Entrepreneurs and the a number of underserved communities these ladies remodel throughout Africa. By fostering inclusion and offering alternatives, we unlock the potential of girls in all places to construct a brighter future. Photo voltaic Sister believes that vitality 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 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 dwelling in sub-Saharan Africa.
When ladies in these last-mile communities are linked to Photo voltaic Sister’s distinctive community-driven mannequin, they grow to be the infrastructure wanted to impress 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 inexpensive, clear vitality. These merchandise mitigate the detrimental 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.
So far, Photo voltaic Sister has supplied greater than 4.5 million individuals with clear vitality 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.
Ladies in sub-Saharan Africa are 30% much less doubtless to personal a smartphone than males within the area. Addressing these gender gaps is essential to ship the numerous advantages of digital instruments and the web to ladies, their households, communities, and the economic system.
Photo voltaic Sister is dedicated to empowering ladies and assembly our entrepreneurs the place they’re by discovering new and revolutionary methods to assist them because the world turns into increasingly 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. So far, they’ve delivered this preliminary coaching to over 400 entrepreneurs and developed extra modules on buyer information assortment and different advertising subjects which will likely 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 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 assist is permitting us to develop a high-quality teaching app that’s tailored and attentive to 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 do not need entry to the fundamental providers that allow equal progress towards higher lives. Trickle Up’s mission is to associate with ladies in excessive poverty to construct financial alternative and drive inclusion. In Trickle Up’s applications, 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 assist 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 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 scale back teaching prices, and preserve constantly 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 affect:
- 82% of Trickle Up’s members skilled elevated company and decision-making energy.
- 86% of Trickle Up’s members proceed to save lots of for his or her enterprise, childcare, training, and an improved high quality of life.
- 82% of Trickle Up’s members attain meals safety for themselves and their households.
Become involved:
- Be a part of Trickle Up’s e mail checklist and study extra about how you can assist and observe their work.
- Give at the moment: Your present has an outsized affect on individuals dwelling in excessive poverty. It solely takes $250 to offer a lady the vital seed capital she must jumpstart her microenterprise.
- Observe 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 observe their journey.
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