cisco Exams-cisco Building Bridges Between Hope and Possibility

Technology holds great promise to improve lives – consider how every second in India, three people experience the Internet for the first time. Or how video collaboration units enable  patients at family health clinics in rural areas in Africa to connect to specialists at larger medical centers.

Yet technology can do little if a person lacks access to basic needs. We live in a world of complex global challenges that deeply impact millions around the world—water scarcity, hunger, homelessness, and unemployment, to name a few. According to the World Bank, 10 percent of the world’s population lives on less than US$1.90 a day. In addition, 2.1 billion people lack reliable access to safely-managed drinking water services, and 4.5 billion lack safely-managed sanitation services.

At Cisco, making a difference and improving lives around the world has been core to who we are for over 30 years. We have consistently leveraged our technology to solve real business and social problems, and ultimately to build bridges to new possibilities. It is this mission that has driven us to establish our Networking Academy program, which for more than 20 years has been providing IT training, preparing students around the world for entry-level jobs, career transitions, and professional certification. More than 9 million students in 180 countries have participated in Networking Academy thus far, and the number continues to grow.

We are also committed to helping locally within our own community – earlier this year, we made a five-year, $50 million commitment to Destination: Home, a San Jose-based public-private partnership focused on providing permanent housing to the chronically homeless in Santa Clara County.  We also recently announced a new $20 million TECH Fund investment with Pure Storage and LinkedIn to help build affordable homes in the greater Bay Area.

But given the incredible complexity of the issues that face us, it is clear that governments, companies, educational institutions, nonprofits, and individuals working in isolation cannot address these challenges alone. We all must work together to partner, creating local, regional, or national strategies and take advantage of the opportunities digitization can provide.

Partnering is also core to who we are at Cisco – we do it with our own customers and partners every day, helping them take advantage of the full potential of our technology and solutions. But we also do it with other organizations – schools, nonprofits, governments – that can help us leverage technology to have a positive impact on the world.

It is this commitment that has led us to build a partnership with Global Citizen, an organization focused on mobilizing 100 million socially-minded advocates who want to end extreme global poverty by 2030. Cisco and Global Citizen are united in our belief that we must all take a role in helping solve the world’s biggest problems, and that young people around the world can lead the way.