Impact stories
Our goals:
Create a digital world that is inherently an inclusive world
Use connectivity to materially improve lives
Cisco social impact grant programs are unique in providing funding at early stages to help create, seed, and grow equitable, technology-enabled social impact solutions and guide participants on the road to self-sufficiency. These grants are underpinned by donations of Cisco technology to help our nonprofit partners securely, efficiently, and effectively deliver their programs and services, and are supported by the expertise of our global employee community.
The following pages profile success stories from nonprofit partner organizations across four categories:
charity: water leverages technology to bring clean and safe water to people around the world.
Living Goods provides technology tools to deliver life-saving healthcare resources to vulnerable communities.
MIND Research Institute and MIND Education create programs that enhance students’ abilities to solve mathematical problems.
Cisco Networking Academy prepares students for careers in IT, security, and networking.
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One in four people globally don’t have access to safe drinking water.1
Almost one-third of the world’s population live in “water scarce” communities and rely on small-scale water systems, such as hand pumps, that suffer frequent failures.
An estimated 25 percent of water points in Africa and 6 percent in India are non-functional.2
In-person visits are required to monitor, service, and repair water systems; these are time-consuming, complicated, and expensive.
charity: water, with support from Cisco’s Global Impact Grant program, developed and deployed a first-of-its-kind, IoT-based sensor that remotely monitors water usage and health of hand pumps using a sophisticated web management portal.
The IoT sensor installs easily without specialized tools and operates in remote, low-resource environments, with a battery life of ten years or more.
The sensors’ sophisticated algorithm tracks water flow rate, temperature, and location throughout each day, sending data to the cloud-based platform over a cellular network for pennies per week.
1 Our World in Data: Clean Water2 Taylor & Francis Online: Functionality of handpump water supplies: a review of data from sub-Saharan Africa and the Asia-Pacific region
Organizations can remotely monitor sensors on the web portal without time-consuming, expensive in-person visits.
Operators can remotely detect service degradation or failures and proactively plan maintenance and repair activities, reducing pump down-time.
The ability to deploy at scale has been proven with 2000 sensors now operating successfully in the field.
The use of remote sensors is a huge step in addressing the sustainability challenges of rural water systems throughout the world. With the real-time information on fluctuations in water flow, local organizations are able to identify water points that require repair and dispatch mechanics to get the water point back online as quickly as possible, keeping safe, clean water flowing and reducing the possibility that community members ever have to return to an unsafe water source.”
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Living Goods helps save lives at scale by providing digitally enabled tools, data, and resources to community health workers who deliver on-call care to families and communities in three countries in Africa. With early-stage and continued support from Cisco, Living Goods developed Smart Health applications, so health workers can track their clients’ health and information on a mobile device, and directly communicate with individuals and families. Living Goods also securely collects and validates large volumes of data, which enables it to identify areas of need and direct resources appropriately to address those needs.
Watch the video to learn more.
Saving lives and creating jobs: In Africa, lack of access to healthcare results in millions of deaths from preventable diseases. Living Goods:
Provides mobile technology and training to community health workers so they earn a livable income while delivering on-call, affordable healthcare to families
Strengthens community health systems
Ensures health workers are effectively equipped, compensated, and supervised
Applies a validated model that delivers positive health outcomes at low cost
Mobile technology improves healthcare: Cisco funded the development of a mobile technology platform that enhances healthcare and optimizes operations by:
Registering every pregnancy and newborn child, including risk assessments
Providing information to promote better healthcare practices
Enabling reliable diagnoses of common diseases with detection of early outbreaks
Providing treatment protocols and information to parents
Tracking immunization records
Predicting high-risk residents, who then receive priority care
Mobile platform increases impact: Digitization has enabled Living Goods to hire more community health workers and reach more residents:
Living Goods health workers increase use of malaria medicines by children almost 40 percent in villages served
Pharmacies are 50 percent less likely to have counterfeit medicines in regions where Living Goods operates
95 percent of health workers report that Living Goods taught them skills that will help them find another job or start a business
Average health worker earns enough money to cover school fees for two to three children
Living Goods advisory services help other organizations successfully apply its model in other countries
Save lives today and support a better tomorrow: You can learn more about Living Goods and support the organization financially by using the following links:
Learn more about Living Goods
Donate to Living Goods
Living Goods is building an innovative double-bottom line model that empowers micro-entrepreneurs to earn an income by dramatically improving the health, wealth, and productivity of people living in poverty.”
Kenya’s rural communities, with poor infrastructure, present challenges to residents seeking healthcare services.
Families typically spend a day traveling to a clinic and waiting in line for hours to be seen.
Children under five years of age experience numerous health issues, including malaria, pneumonia, and diarrhea.
Rosaline was trained to be a community health worker (CHW), able to assess and treat many of the medical conditions affecting local community families.
As a CHW, Rosaline visits local families in their homes to provide more immediate care.
From Living Goods, supported by Cisco, Rosaline received a smart phone to help her track patients, diagnose illnesses, and provide education to clients. She also receives a reliable medication supply to treat common diseases.
Rosaline serves about a hundred families in her community.
The Smart Health app guides Rosaline through assessment and diagnostic steps. For more advanced treatment needs, the app refers patients to a clinic, linking information for continuity of care.
Rosaline has built a successful career as a CHW, enhancing her own abilities with ongoing education in business, health, and technology topics.
As a woman, I felt inspired knowing that I was now equipped with lifesaving knowledge that would help my community. I also felt empowered as my understanding of health grew. My CHW career, as well as the support I’ve received from Living Goods, has given me more opportunities to become visible and influential within my community and around the world.”
More than 1.7 million people globally lack access to financial services such as loans, insurance, or savings accounts, making it difficult for them to start businesses, protect crops, save for future education needs, or invest in their families.
In many rural or under-served communities, women have less access to financial solutions than men.
Devina Konadu, a single mother in Ghana, wanted to start her own business but lacked access to financial tools and services that could help her succeed.
Opportunity International (Opportunity) works to reach impoverished residents and offer them access to financial services.
Opportunity and Cisco worked together to develop and launch a suite of digital banking products and services designed to increase financial inclusion among people that are under-banked. Technology such as iris and fingerprint scans, and voice-recorded training, helped reach and include more people, even those who cannot read or write well.
Opportunity conducted local training sessions to help people understand how to use the digital financial solutions.
Newly launched digital financial services in Devina’s community enabled her to use her phone to send and receive money, deposit money, and access her bank account quickly and safely.
Devina can conduct business electronically, eliminating the need to carry large amounts of cash for business-related purchases.
Digital services continued and grew during the COVID-19 pandemic, when in-person interactions became restricted.
Since 2017, Opportunity estimates they have empowered more than 16M people living in extreme poverty to access financial growth opportunities, 94 percent of whom are women.
I am saving for my children’s education and future uncertainties. I have bought land through my savings; I have laid the foundation and am hoping to continue building a home with my savings. I save regularly to help me achieve my goals and targets.”
STEM education and digital economy careers hinge upon participants with strong math skills, yet unfortunately these skills by students are in decline.
Math outcomes for students have declined globally, primarily driven by school closures related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Internationally, as measured in OECD participating countries, between 2018 and 2022, and on average across 35 OECD countries, mean performance dropped by almost 15 score points in mathematics.3
Within the United States, eighth grade math performance as measured by the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) indicated similar declines were lower by an average of eight points compared to 2019.4
The NAEP math averages don’t reveal the complete picture that 92 percent of Black, 91 percent of Native American, and 89 percent of Hispanic students graduate from high school in the US without meeting proficiency in math.5
3 OECD iLibrary: PISA 2022 Results (Volume 1)4 NAEP Report Card: Mathematics: Grade 85 NAEP Report Card: Mathematics: Grade 12
MIND Research (MIND) addresses the math learning and literacy gaps for all early grade students to build math knowledge while still in primary school.
MIND and Cisco worked together to build and scale ST Math and innovate on InsightMath comprehensive curriculum solutions. Using Cisco products, software and cash investments, MIND and Cisco built innovative curricula with translation and localization, content management solutions, learning game development, and platform and authoring tools to support organization scale and drive school district growth and financial sustainability.
ST Math has replicated and scaled across the United States with ESSA Tier 1 RCT research finding that the solution has statistically significant efficacy and evidence of learning with over 14,000 students, 50+ schools, and 10 districts participating.6
Following the COVID-19 pandemic, ESSA Tier 2 – Quasi-experimental (QED) study found that, on average, schools using ST Math solutions recovered the students ‘learning loss’ by the end of the 21-22 academic year, compared with match peers.
Learn more about MIND programs from their website.
6 ERIC: Randomized Trial of Elementary School ST Math Software Intervention Reveals Significant Efficacy
The U.N.’s World Food Programme (WFP) set a goal of Zero Hunger for the world’s population by 2030.
Achieving this goal requires passion, skills, and digital technology expertise from a variety of workers.
Ernest Wambari of Kenya grew up with little interest in or access to computers, until he was in university.
Wambari enrolled in Cisco Networking Academy and became the first Kenyan to achieve a Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE) classification.
After working for several organizations and his own startup, Wambari joined WFP with a wide array of technology and business skills.
Wambari works on the WFP networking team, helping to streamline and modernize an operation that helps more than 100M people cope with food insecurities. They are refreshing 600 locations in 80+ countries and deploying new edge devices.
Wambari sees his current role as a natural progression of his skills and is excited to serve countries in the developing world using technology.
The WFP was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October 2020 and was praised for its ability to intensify efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Wambari continues to explore new ways of fighting hunger, along with corruption and cybercrime.
My proudest achievement is just to inspire other people, to show them I’m from Africa, I’m here, I’m working with a team of people and we are actually driving things.”
