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 ladies, globally.
Worldwide Girls’s Day is well known around the globe on March 8. This yr’s theme, Encourage Inclusion, is a bedrock of Cisco’s Social Influence partnerships the place we goal to help an inclusive future for all — and just lately exceeded our ten-year purpose to positively impression 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 impression 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 impression 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 international worker neighborhood to supply 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 purpose by offering individuals, particularly ladies, with equitable entry to the information, abilities, and sources 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 ladies – wanted higher help to reverse the excessive maternal and youngster loss of life charges and to flee generational cycles of dependency and poverty,” says Miriam. “It struck me how enhancing ladies’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 ladies succeed, the complete neighborhood thrives.”
—Miriam Mbithe, Group Well being Employee, Dwelling 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 youngster and maternal mortality charges.
Group well being employees (CHWs) are a low-cost and high-impact well being resolution. Dwelling Items helps greater than 11,400 digitally empowered neighborhood 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 lowering youngster mortality by 27% and youngster stunting by 7% at a price 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 youngsters underneath the age of two have been totally immunized.
Dwelling Items ensures CHWs have the digital instruments, coaching, medication, 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 improvement 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 offered help for his or her cell know-how platform, knowledge warehouse creation, predictive algorithms to focus on interventions to at-risk households, efficiency administration, and interoperability with authorities techniques. 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 the whole lot 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 downside, One Acre Fund sees a robust likelihood to eradicate excessive starvation and poverty by making one occupation radically extra productive: farming. They designed an built-in resolution that permits 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 rapidly as attainable; at present, 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 occasions 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 further farmer-facing companies akin to linkages to industrial worth chains that can 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 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:
- As an illustration, 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 usually ship loans and trainings to farmer teams fairly 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 ladies, 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, ladies persistently obtain the identical transformative productiveness and earnings 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 Girls’s Worldwide Day, we have a good time 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 every single place to construct a brighter future. Photo voltaic Sister believes that power entry is a essential 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 the planet. In addition 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 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 grow to be 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 reasonably priced, clear power. These merchandise mitigate the unfavorable native and international results of conventional power 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.
So far, Photo voltaic Sister has offered greater than 4.5 million individuals 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 probably 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 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 progressive 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 will probably 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 ladies to start out clear power companies and create significant impression of their communities and supply greater than 30,000,000 individuals with entry to scrub power 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 setting and ensures entry to constant, low-cost teaching for all Trickle Up’s contributors, 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 ladies in excessive poverty to construct financial alternative and drive inclusion. In Trickle Up’s applications, ladies 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, accessible for anybody to make use of. The partnership with Cisco to create train-the-trainer sources and movies helps ladies’s monetary inclusion and company by way of improved digital and monetary literacy.
Utilizing the app in program supply is an progressive resolution to scaling Trickle Up’s work by way of NGO companions, permitting them to cut back teaching prices, and keep persistently 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 purpose to achieve 1 million contributors by 2030.
Trickle Up’s impression:
- 82% of Trickle Up’s contributors skilled elevated company and decision-making energy.
- 86% of Trickle Up’s contributors proceed to save lots of for his or her enterprise, childcare, schooling, and an improved high quality of life.
- 82% of Trickle Up’s contributors attain meals safety for themselves and their households.
Become involved:
- Be a part of Trickle Up’s e-mail listing and be taught extra about the best way to help and comply with their work.
- Give at present: Your reward has an outsized impression on individuals dwelling in excessive poverty. It solely takes $250 to supply a girl the essential seed capital she must jumpstart her microenterprise.
- Observe Trickle Up on social media: Be a part of their on-line neighborhood 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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