Cisco Blog > Corporate Social Responsibility
January 24, 2012 at 8:55 am PST
Molly’s World is a series of short videos chronicling the life of Molly, a girl living in the Mathare slum of Nairobi, Kenya. Two episodes have been released on the YouTube channel MollyKenya.
This series is brought you by the United Nations World Food Programme and made possible by an in-kind donation of Flip Video cameras by Cisco Corporate Social Responsibility. Learn more about the Flip Video program in a previous blog post.
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Tags: africa, Cisco, ciscocsr, corporatesocialresponsibility, CSR, impactmultiplied, Kenya, mathare, Nairobi, networkingacademy, social investment, society, wfp, worldfoodprogram
December 12, 2011 at 8:53 am PST
Imagine you are 17 years old, you live in Kenya, and you are deaf. In this part of the world, deaf and disabled people are considered “cursed.” Your family is ashamed of you. You can’t communicate with them or with anyone else. Nor can you go to school, see a doctor, get a job, or make friends. You are alone, with little hope that your life will ever change. Now, imagine being able to personally help teenagers like this, without even leaving your office building.
Karim Remu, a Cisco systems engineer in Toronto, is doing it — by mentoring a group of deaf students who participate in a Cisco Networking Academy program in Nairobi, Kenya designed just for them. If you aren’t already familiar with Cisco Networking Academy, it is a global program that teaches students how to design, build, manage, and secure computer networks. Networking Academy helps fill a mounting demand for network professionals worldwide, and also provides a path to a career and financial independence for participants.
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Tags: africa, canada, Cisco, Cisco Employees, Cisco TelePresence, ciscocsr, corporatesocialresponsibility, CSR, deaf-aid, impactmultiplied, Kenya, Nairobi, netacad, networkingacademy, social investment, society, toronto, volunteerism
By Jason Kohn, Contributing Columnist
A while back, I wrote about the potential for mobile banking to create new opportunity and economic growth in developing countries. Now, I’d like to look at how a related application, mobile agriculture (m-agriculture), is transforming rural villages.
M-agriculture is about bringing mobile information access to rural communities and small-hold farmers. While the concept is still in its infancy, early implementations suggest it can make a big difference.
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Tags: africa, cloud services, economic development, farmers, india, M-agriculture, rural
In my recent blog, From Cairo to Nairobi- Eye to Eye at the Touch of a Button, I explained how we are achieving massive cost savings and efficiencies at Cisco as a global organisation and more recently across the continent of Africa, thanks to immersive TelePresence.
In fact the vast majority of our sales force in Africa, 7 out of 10 employees, now have access to this flagship communication and collaboration tool at their local Cisco office. This means they can meet face to face in a life-size virtual meeting with colleagues, customers and partners across the globe without the need to travel, as if they were sat in the same meeting room just across the table from one another. So what are we doing for the remaining 30% of employees on the continent who do not have access to this capability?
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Tags: africa, coc-collaboration, collaboration, communication, cost saving, desktop, Emerging Markets, face to face, high definition, tandberg, video
In my last blog, “Africa – Connected Continent – At last”, I described how the arrival of affordable internet bandwidth in Africa is enabling companies to use technology to transform how they do business. Today at Cisco we have realised huge efficiencies in how we conduct our business internally and we have fundamentally changed how we communicate and collaborate with customers and partners, thanks to TelePresence.
TelePresence allow people to meet face to face over the network without the need to travel. Participants enjoy a high definition, high quality, life-size video experience and can share rich media content. We can now bring in subject matter experts from over one thousand Cisco TelePresence rooms across the globe and put them together with the vast majority of our workforce in Africa as if they were sat just across the table from each another; all at the touch of a button. In fact we can connect Cisco’s TelePresence rooms with any customer or partner TelePresence room, provided they have a B2B exchange with Cisco, so the possibilities are huge.
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Tags: africa, coc-collaboration, cost saving, efficiencies, high definition, meeting, tandberg, TelePresence, video, virtual
