Social Impact Partners
Creating digital solutions to social problems
Working through nonprofit and nongovernmental partners, Cisco and the Cisco Foundation help create technology-based solutions for climate, crisis response, economic empowerment, and education, thereby improving lives around the globe.
Cisco Crisis Response partners
Cisco Crisis Response invests in strategic partnerships with cash, product, and technical expertise to support programs that leverage technology to improve access to food, clean water, shelter, and disaster relief.
Akvo (multinational, not including United States)
Akvo's mission is to bring data-driven decision making and innovative technology to the development sector. Cisco has supported the development of FLOW, a data collection tool designed for the humanitarian context; Lumen, a data analysis and visualization tool; and Caddisfly, a mobile-based water quality testing tool. We have also supported advancement of remote data collection capabilities.
American Red Cross (multinational, including United States)
The American Red Cross prevents and alleviates human suffering in the face of emergencies by mobilizing the power of volunteers and the generosity of donors. Cisco partners with the American Red Cross to respond to disasters through cash grants, employee giving campaigns, and volunteers who offer relief services to people affected by natural disasters.
charity: water (multinational, not including United States)
charity: water’s mission is to bring clean and safe drinking water to people in developing countries. Cisco has been supporting their IoT sensor program to enable remote monitoring of hand pumps, reducing pump down-time, and improving efficiencies of maintenance programs.
Destination: Home (United States)
Silicon Valley is home to some of the most prosperous communities in the United States, yet it has the fourth-largest homeless population in the country. Destination: Home is working to make homelessness rare, brief, and nonrecurrent in Santa Clara County, California. Since 2018, Cisco has donated over US$65 million to help accelerate development of new housing, use technology to improve coordination of existing resources, and offer support to prevent homelessness for individuals and families at risk.
International Rescue Committee (multinational, including United States)
Signpost is a scalable community-led responsive service that delivers critical information to people in need in times of crisis through local service maps, websites and social media, and two-way communications. Cisco’s support since inception has enabled IRC to scale Signpost to dozens of countries across 5 continents, reaching millions of people.
KoboToolbox (multinational, including United States)
KoboToolbox is a free and open-source data collection, management, and sharing platform for humanitarian aid organizations. Cisco has been supporting KoboToolbox since 2014 to help transform the platform and enable it to scale to serve tens of thousands of organizations reaching over 170M people in humanitarian crises across 240 countries and territories.
Mercy Corps (multinational, including United States)
Mercy Corps is a global team of humanitarians whose mission is to alleviate suffering, poverty, and oppression by helping people build secure, productive, and just communities. Mercy Corps has been a strategic Cisco partner since 2006. Since 2017, Cisco has provided US$20 million in its partnership with Mercy Corps to use technology to transform the delivery of humanitarian aid, and to support client resilience and adaptation.
myAgro (multinational, not including United States)
myAgro's mission is to empower smallholder farmers, especially women, to reduce poverty and increase food security. Cisco has supported digitization of myAgro's operations through technology platforms since 2018, including Mobile Layaway, Mobile Money, and the organization's latest flagship product, myAgro Connect. myAgro's unique model helps farmers in sub-Saharan Africa use their mobile phones to save money to purchase high-quality seeds and fertilizers. The farmers can also access support and training on climate-smart agricultural practices to improve yields and protect the environment.
NetHope (multinational, including United States)
NetHope helps its 63-member consortium of nonprofits to effectively address the world’s most pressing challenges through collaboration, collective action, and the smarter use of technology. Cisco supports NetHope in scaling up the collective ability of the NetHope community to prepare for and respond to disaster, to combat cybercrime, and to seed collaborations and digital solutions for climate-affected communities.
Norwegian Refugee Council (multinational, not including United States)
NRC’s mission is to protect the rights of people who have been forced to leave their countries or homes due to disasters, conflict, or adverse effects of climate change. Cisco has been supporting their Digital Community Hubs (DCH), a platform that facilitates engagement over mobile phones between communities in needs and humanitarian actors.
One Acre Fund (multinational, not including United States)
One Acre Fund’s mission is to eradicate extreme hunger and poverty through more productive farming. Cisco has been supporting Tupande, an innovative tech-based rural retail extension program that improves farmers’ access to high quality products, training and support and enables them to increase their yields and incomes.
Replate (United States)
Replate's mission is to eliminate food waste and alleviate food insecurity. Using the nonprofit's technology platform, donors of surplus food connect with organizations that distribute the food to people in need. Cisco has supported development of the platform with advanced AI-based algorithms to optimize Replate's operations.
Simprints (multinational, not including United States)
Cisco is supporting Simprints' efforts to build inclusive, ethical, AI-powered biometrics for identification in developing countries. This support will help ensure that each beneficiary receives the goods or services to which they are entitled, while reducing duplication and fighting fraud or misuse in humanitarian programs at scale.
UN ETC (Emergency Telecommunications Cluster) (multinational, not including United States)
Cisco Crisis Response serves as a standby partner for the ETC. Managed by the UN World Food Programme, ETC is a global network of organizations that work together to provide shared communications services in humanitarian emergencies. Cisco is one of only two trusted private sector members in a network composed mainly of nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations.
UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) (multinational, not including United States)
UNHCR leads international action to protect people forced to flee conflict and persecution and those denied a nationality. Cisco Crisis Response is a standby partner with UNHCR Refugee Emergency Telecommunications Sector (RETS), which supports emergency response efforts by providing Internet connectivity and secure communications for frontline humanitarian workers and displaced populations.
Economic empowerment partners
Through its Global Impact Cash Grants, Cisco supports technology-based programs that connect underserved people to relevant skills, meaningful employment, entrepreneurial opportunities, financial products and services, and other resources they need to thrive.
Agora Partnerships (multinational, not including United States)
Agora Partnerships calibrates the entrepreneurship ecosystem in Latin America to build inclusive prosperity for individuals, businesses, the community, and the environment. Cisco is supporting Agora Partnerships in their Ecochallenge interactive platform which empowers entrepreneurs to apply green solutions to run, enhance, and accelerate their businesses, increase revenue, enter new markets/gain market share, and reduce their carbon footprint.
Astia (multinational, including United States)
Astia is transforming the way businesses are funded, providing capital, connections, and guidance that fuel the growth of best-in-class female high-growth entrepreneurs. Cisco is supporting Astia Connect, leveraging technology to enable Astia advisors, entrepreneurs, and investors to develop deeper connections while helping Astia to improve the scale, efficiency, and impact of its work.
Bridges to Prosperity (multinational, not including United States)
Bridges To Prosperity builds bridges to better lives in rural communities. Trail bridges connect rural communities to critical services such as healthcare, education, and markets, which in turn, massively improve livelihoods and well-being across the board. Cisco is supporting Bridges to Prosperity’s Fika Map project, a suite of remote analysis AI and machine learning tools to identify transportation barriers in rural, hard-to-reach regions by harnessing publicly available data.
Center on Rural Innovation (United States)
Center on Rural Innovation (CORI) works with rural communities to build tech economies. As strategists, advocates, connectors, and champions, they collaborate with members of their Rural Innovation Network to launch initiatives and programs that support innovation, entrepreneurship, workforce development, and tech job creation in the places they call home. Cisco is supporting CORI’s work use technology to improve the impact of their workforce development programs.
Centro Community Partners (multinational, including United States)
Centro provides low-income, minority, and female entrepreneurs with entrepreneurship education, one-on-one business coaching, mentorship, leadership programs, and access to capital so they can create local jobs, become financially stable, and help build thriving communities. Through support from Cisco, Centro is streamlining and improving the efficiency of its operations, as well as developing innovations for entrepreneurship through Centro Labs.
Defy Ventures (United States)
Defy’s entrepreneurial programs enable one of America’s largest forgotten communities – the formerly incarcerated – to defy the odds. Defy equips their Entrepreneurs In Training with new skills, new connections, and a new belief to match their new purpose to help them succeed in their new life of economic independence. Cisco is supporting Defy to digitize their CEO of Your New Life curriculum to enable scaling to new prison locations.
Entrepreneurship for All (United States)
Entrepreneurship for All (EforAll) is accelerating economic and social impact through entrepreneurship in midsize U.S. cities. The organization supports entrepreneurial growth by way of an innovative small business/nonprofit accelerator. Cisco is supporting EforAll to virtualize all of their offerings, enabling them to quickly scale across the U.S.
FINCA (multinational, not including United States)
FINCA’s mission is to alleviate poverty through lasting solutions that help people build assets, create jobs, and raise their standard of living. The organization offers responsible, relevant, and affordable financial products and services, such as small loans or savings accounts. FINCA reaches people in remote communities using technology like mobile phones and tablets, and provides access to life-enhancing products, like clean cook stoves. Cisco is supporting FINCA in using technology and data to target clients with relevant and culturally sensitive content in local languages, as well as FINCA Ventures’ investments in innovative companies focusing on climate and fintech solutions throughout Africa.
Generation (multinational, including United States)
Generation is a global nonprofit network that supports people to achieve economic mobility and a better life. They transform education to employment systems to prepare, place, and support people into life-changing careers that would otherwise be inaccessible. Cisco is supporting Generation’s platform upgrades, enabling both global scale and to enhanced data capture, as well AI pilots in its job search and match functionality.
International Rescue Committee (multinational, including United States)
Support for Afghan Financial Empowerment (SAFE) is an initiative launched by IRC and IRC's Center for Economic Opportunity (CEO) to empower Afghan families as they begin their journey to financial stability and economic security in their new homes across the U.S. Cisco’s support is enabling the IRC to expand the existing SAFE platform to build out multi-lingual tech offerings to serve as a portal for all immigrant, refugee, and diverse communities, starting with Spanish-speaking communities. SAFE is now known as Supporting Access to Financial Empowerment.
Laboratoria (multinational, not including United States)
Laboratoria empowers young women from low-income backgrounds in Latin America by giving them access to education and work in the digital sector. Cisco is providing support for the development of Laboratoria's assessment, learning, and evaluation platform, and expand their breath of offerings.
Living Goods (multinational, not including United States)
With Cisco's support, Living Goods has developed and implemented a set of mobile apps and underlying technology platform to increase the scale, efficiency, and effectiveness of the organization's micro-entrepreneur network and improve health outcomes for women and children in Uganda, Kenya, and Burkina Faso.
NESsT (multinational, not including United States)
NESsT develops sustainable social enterprises that solve critical social problems in emerging market economies. Cisco is supporting digital enhancements to NESsT’s Refugee Employment Initiative, focused on Ukranian refugees in Poland and Romania; and their investments in climate- and tech-focused entrepreneurs in the Amazon region.
New Energy Nexus (multinational, including United States)
New Energy Nexus’ mission is to support diverse entrepreneurs to drive innovation and build equity into the global clean energy economy. Cisco is supporting the New Energy Academy, an online-offline training platform for electricians and technical professionals looking to build their solar installation and design skills and enter the solar sector as an entrepreneur or professional. It was designed to vastly accelerate the training and qualification of new solar professionals around the world, and its goal is to ensure that adequate installation capacity comes online to meet demand for solar energy.
Opportunity International (multinational, not including United States)
With Cisco support, Opportunity International is designing and delivering mobile banking products and training to low-income people globally who lack access to financial products and services.
Solar Sister (multinational, not including United States)
Solar Sister invests in women's clean energy businesses in off-grid communities in Africa. The organization recruits, trains, and supports female entrepreneurs to build businesses and bring clean energy to their communities. These efforts create income-generating opportunities for women, as well as positive environmental and health outcomes in the communities Solar Sister supports. Cisco is supporting the organization in using technology to enhance the digital skills of its entrepreneurs and improve the efficiency of Solar Sister's operations to support its overall growth objectives.
Trickle Up (multinational, not including United States)
Trickle Up supports the development of sustainable livelihoods for women who live in extreme poverty: those who struggle to survive on less, and often far less, than US$1.90 per day. The organization uses a "graduation" approach to help women start and build financially viable businesses. Cisco is supporting Trickle Up in applying technology to connect coaches with their beneficiaries to deliver capacity building and other critical services, which will facilitate deeper connections between Trickle Up and the women it serves.
Upwardly Global (United States)
Upwardly Global works to eliminate employment barriers for skilled immigrants and refugees who have international credentials, so they can successfully join the professional U.S. workforce. Cisco is supporting the organization's efforts to develop, pilot and scale tech-enabled products and services that address barriers to quality employment faced by immigrant and refugee job seekers.
Education partners
Through Global Impact Cash Grants, Cisco identifies partners with innovative, technology-based programs that improve student performance and engagement, particularly in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) studies and among underserved communities.
The Algebra Project (United States)
The Algebra Project is dedicated to enhancing math literacy through innovative approaches in secondary education, aiming to elevate math skills for all children in the United States. Recognizing math literacy as essential in the 21st century, Cisco’s investment will raise awareness and improve access to math education resources for underserved communities, ensuring broader math literacy.
BellXcel (United States)
BellXcel is a nationally recognized nonprofit that creates innovative solutions for school districts and community organizations to improve out-of-school-time (OST) programs. Cisco investments focuses on BellXcel’s Youth Management Platform called Arly. These investments will improve the overall user experience for families of OST program participants, increase the sustainability of OST partners, reduce burdens on families, and ensure more underserved youth can access evidence-based OST programs.
CareerVillage.org (multinational, including United States)
CareerVillage democratizes access to career information and advice for underrepresented youth by crowdsourcing the answers to all questions students submit about any career. Millions of learners use CareerVillage to get free personalized career advice from real-life professionals. Cisco is supporting CareerVillage.org in Class 2.0, a personalized online learning program that schools and nonprofits can offer to their students at low or no cost. The instantly accessible program offers self-paced activities to boost students' career readiness.
CODE.org (multinational, including United States)
Code.org works to expand access to computer science education in schools and to increase participation by women and underrepresented minorities. With Cisco's support, Code.org aims to expand its reach globally, with a goal of benefiting more than 25 million new students within the next five years.
Color My Outdoors (United States)
ColorMyOutdoors is working to change the narrative of the outdoors. For too long, the story of outdoor recreation and education has excluded people of color—people who have historical and ancestral ties to the land. Their new narrative celebrates the adventurers, explorers, and influencers who have led and who are leading the way for new generations of outdoor enthusiasts.
CommonLit (multinational, including United States)
CommonLit delivers open-source, flexible, and research-based instructional materials created by teachers, for teachers, to support literacy development for students. Cisco's investment helps millions of teachers and students to better synthesize, analyze, and evaluate literature by digitally annotating and highlighting text.
Cool.org (multinational, not including United States)
Cool.org equips educators to provide exceptional learning experiences for future-ready students. Cisco's support is enhancing Cool.org's professional development platform known as Learn 2.0 with the goal to improve educational outcomes for all students and equip them with the skills and knowledge they will need to solve real-world issues in social, environmental, and STEM focus areas.
Darsel (multinational, including United States)
Darsel seeks to improve learning outcomes and reverse learning losses from the COVID-19 pandemic in resource-constrained communities, with special focus on math for K–12 students in developing countries. It uses SMS and Meta (Facebook) messaging to support students who have limited access to educational technology (edtech) solutions because of internet or device-related constraints. Cisco’s investment helped Darsel's development of a teacher-facing platform enabling math education and remediation.
European Schoolnet (multinational, not including United States)
European Schoolnet collaborates with teachers through a network of over 30 member countries from Europe and the Middle East to improve innovation and access to STEM education. Cisco's investment centers on the Scientix initiative, STEM programs, and European edtech startup projects.
Glific (multinational, not including United States)
Glific is an open-source, two-way communication platform that helps to bridge the gap between nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and their beneficiaries by using open-source technology, digital communication, behavioral insights, and cross-shared learning. Cisco’s support is helping Glific education partners to improve teacher capacity and student outcomes across Asia, Latin America, and EMEA using mobile SMS and Meta messaging to improve digital communication.
Human-I-T (United States)
Human-I-T strives to create equitable access to opportunity by providing devices, internet access, digital skills training, and tech support for communities left on the wrong side of the digital divide. Cisco’s investment enabled Human-I-T to innovate its circular economy IT infrastructure to refurbish technology at higher device yields, increase device placement with student families and enhance the customer service experience overall at Human-I-T.
mEducation Alliance (Africa)
mEducation Alliance and its MathPower initiative focus on reaching youth learners across Africa with innovative and evidence-driven initiatives. Cisco investments led to the design and launch of “MathPower! Explorer,” an early-stage math education edtech solution to be a prototype for math education using interactive voice response (IVR) and feature phones based in Rwanda.
picoCTF (multinational, including United States)
An initiative of CyLab, picoCTF is a free computer security game that is targeted at middle school and high school students and was created by security experts at Carnegie Mellon University. Cisco support has helped picoCTF transition into a teacher-focused education program by developing a robust online portal that supports teachers' professional development.
Raspberry Pi Foundation (multinational, including United States)
The Raspberry Pi Foundation was based in the United Kingdom with the mission to encourage young people to study computer science. With Cisco’s investment, the Raspberry Pi Foundation created digital projects and collaboration opportunities, teaching content, and interactive experiences, including Python programming within the Code Club World platform and its network of Code Club sessions and global Coder Dojo workshops.
Save The Children (multinational, including United States)
Save the Children strives for creating lasting change in the lives of children in need in the United States and around the world. Cisco invests in the Waliku program that provides an attendance capture with learning outcomes platform for frontline educators in underserved communities around the world. Waliku ensures systematic data capture, teacher dashboards and analytics for monitoring education participation and learning outcomes with educators and parents.
Science Buddies (multinational, including United States)
Cisco has supported the efforts of Science Buddies to provide a dynamic, engaging stream of STEM-related content to students. To date, the organization's educational resources have reached 19 million students, parents, and teachers in 147 countries, focusing on female and other underserved populations. Four out of five educators felt more empowered to teach STEM topics that are outside of their areas of expertise after accessing Science Buddies' resources.
TalkingPoints (United States)
Cisco has provided early-stage support for TalkingPoints' multilingual family engagement platform, which reaches 3 million students, parents, and teachers. This tool enables educators to communicate with parents in their home languages—and to build relationships that help students from diverse and underserved communities to improve their attendance and performance through increased parental involvement.
Ten Strands (United States)
Ten Strands is a California-based nonprofit with a mission to strengthen partnerships and strategies that will bring environmental and climate justice literacy to all of California’s K–12 students. Cisco investment in Ten Strands drives technology development that treats curriculum as software. Ten Strands strives to decrease authoring cycles, innovate with learning experiences and interoperate with school systems.
WeThrive (United States)
WeThrive equips underserved youth with entrepreneurship skills to lead the economic revitalization of their communities. Through an early-stage investment by Cisco, WeThrive adopted a new direct-to-student engagement model and improved engagement with industry. Students gained real-life learning opportunities, mentorship, and 21st century skills training. This investment will broaden access to communities across the United States.
World Possible (multinational, including United States)
World Possible connects offline learners with an educational server called RACHEL (Remote Area Community Hotspot for Education and Learning). Cisco is helping to enable the building of a DataPost application which will collect data from RACHEL devices, store it on an Android application, and deliver it to the internet when connectivity is present for monitoring and evaluation.
Additional partners
Cisco occasionally supports organizations outside or across our investment areas when we discover highly innovative uses of IT or an opportunity to scale the impact of our support for nonprofits.
Network for Good (United States)
As a founding partner, Cisco has supported the expansion of Network for Good's internet-based resources to help nonprofits raise funds, communicate, and strategize.
South Africa Education Trust (South Africa)
The South Africa Education Trust was created in 2008 to support increasing access to education for Black South African students. For example, with support from the trust, the King's School provides primary school education (tuition and boarding) to seven least-served Black South African students.
TechSoup (multinational, including United States)
Cisco and TechSoup work together to connect nonprofits and public libraries with donated and discounted technology products for social benefit around the globe.
Explore our grant programs
Global Impact Cash Grant Program
Funding to multiply the tech-fueled impact of organizations with national or multinational operations
India Cash Grant Program
Funding for programs that serve the underserved in India by applying technology
Technology Grant Program
Donating Cisco networking technology to help nonprofits make innovative use of the internet