In 2018, Camilla Ngala Timfe moved with her family from Cameroon to Baltimore with one career goal in mind: to land a job in cybersecurity.
“I didn’t grow up with technology,” she said. But once Timfe began spending more time online, she wondered how information like financial transactions was protected—and how she could ensure her daughters would be safe while visiting websites. “What happens to all the information that goes on the internet?” she asked. “I needed to learn how to protect myself and my kids.”
Soon after, Timfe enrolled in the Cisco Networking Academy program at the Community College of Baltimore County. Juggling classes, parenting, and a part-time job, she built her skills in networking and IT—eventually landing a role as an analyst for a security operations center. “Networking Academy has been a critical part of the progression of my career,” she said. “I started as an intern, and now I’m a security analyst with a consulting firm working with financial institutions. The program taught me the foundation that I was looking for.”
The Cisco Networking Academy is one of the largest skills-to-jobs programs in the world and has trained over 17 million people in 190 countries around the world, and works with the company’s Country Digital Acceleration (CDA) program to accomplish a core mission: unlocking a more inclusive future through technology. According to an October 2022 industry report, nearly three billion people around the world remain offline, and 43 percent of the global population are without mobiles internet despite living in an area with broadband coverage. “Fostering digital inclusion is of paramount importance,” the report states.
To create a more inclusive future, CDA is collaborating with government leaders to build sustainable, secure, and inclusive communities powered by ethical and innovative technology solutions. So far, CDA has completed over 1,400 projects in 48 countries. These include everything from bringing rural communities online to partnering with the Dutch city of Rotterdam to create the world’s most connected port—packed with sensors and able to dock an autonomous cargo ship for the first time in history. And the program is just getting started.
“People who are connected are on a rocket ship headed for the stratosphere, but those who remain unconnected will be left on the ground,” says Guy Diedrich, Senior Vice President & Global Innovation Officer at Cisco. “Everyone deserves to be on that rocket ship. That’s why we’re helping to close the digital divide by connecting the unconnected.”
Partnering with Governments to Ensure Growth for All
At its core, CDA partners with government leaders to implement plans that reflect the country’s needs. “We won’t start a project unless we have absolute buy-in from the leader of that country,” Diedrich says. “We then ensure academia, industry, and government all have a seat at the table to plan the next big initiatives.”
In 2015, CDA’s first partnership was with France. It helped the country use data to inform urban planning, analyze energy consumption to reduce costs and increase sustainability, and ensure transportation wasn’t impacted by construction, among other initiatives. Since then, CDA has continued to help government leaders execute online strategies that set up smart cities to thrive in the future—from constructing more efficient transportation with edge computing in New South Wales, Australia, to creating a digital map to help citizens plant trees in Brazil. It has even trained students and brought rural populations online in hard-to-reach areas of Egypt and elsewhere.
“About eight years ago, leaders around the world introduced national digital agendas to meet the needs of their communities, but many stalled because there wasn’t an execution plan behind them,” Diedrich says. “So Cisco stepped in to help, and then invested in those pilot programs to make an impact.”
Building Trust to Meet Local Needs
CDA has proven effective through its agility and ability to build trust. The CDA team, for instance, is designed to have just 20 employees, which allows them to partner with people on the ground and collaboratively meet local needs.
“It’s the French team delivering in France, it’s the UK team delivering in the UK,” says Diedrich. “Not only has that allowed us to be more effective, but it’s allowed us to scale exponentially.”
That model was critical during the early stages of the pandemic. Overnight, countries were left scrambling to serve their citizens, with a pressing need for digital health care, education, and government services. Within ten days, Cisco had vetted and funded 70 projects in 25 countries, a rapid response that CDA was able to accomplish thanks to years building trust with government leaders and using local talent to put things in motion, an approach that continues today.
In Norway, for instance, Oslo University Hospital wanted to reduce the time needed to create treatment programs for patients diagnosed with brain cancer, a situation in which every second counts. Putting together treatment plans was a complex process requiring numerous disciplines and doctors, and could take as long as seven weeks to define, document, and launch. Consulting with the CDA team and using the Cisco Webex Multi-Content solution, clinicians were able to come together and immediately consult with one another, cutting the process to an astonishing six days.
“We launched a project and brought together different technologies to reduce diagnosis time,” Diedrich says. “This can help save lives.”
The speed at which CDA was able to get these projects up and running was due in large part to years of working with each country and its leaders on what they consider most important to their success. It’s a process that has been central to CDA’s accomplishments over time, and has contributed to a wide range of projects the program has tackled.
Expanding Access to Public Wi-Fi
One of the most common requests the Country Digital Acceleration program receives is assistance expanding online access to ensure equal educational opportunities, and CDA has been helping students and teachers connect across the world through expanded Wi-Fi.
In Tokyo, for instance, CDA partnered with the Japanese government to drive digitization across the country, including in education. Although 89 percent of K–12 schools in Japan reported being connected to fiber-optic broadband, they were using consumer-grade gateways, and teachers struggled to expand classroom Wi-Fi access. To solve this, CDA provided additional networking equipment, Webex boards, and tablets. It then worked with schools to ensure solutions were tailored to each child’s developmental stage.
In addition, CDA focused on expanding digital coverage to an often overlooked segment of the population: low-income citizens, who may not have internet access outside the classroom. In Toronto, for instance, school and library closures during the pandemic cut connectivity to countless residents. To bridge this divide, city leaders partnered with CDA to create 25 digital canopies in underserved areas downtown, offering free digital Wi-Fi to about 13,000 users, allowing students to continue learning online, workers to remain in jobs that required them to work remotely, and patients to access medical and social support and services.
“Toronto is one of the most connected cities in the world, yet there were large underserved populations without Wi-Fi access,” Diedrich says. “So we created a Wi-Fi mesh around buildings to give free access during COVID and beyond.”
Looking ahead, CDA will continue to work in many of the countries where it’s currently operating (France just committed to a third consecutive partnership), as well as in new locales, including Korea, which is launching 5G factories; Africa, to support IoT incubators for agriculture; the United Arab Emirates, which is building AI-enabled smart classrooms; and elsewhere.
“The Networking Academy and CDA are the most comprehensive approach for excelling in the digital age, bringing together technology and people for the future,” Diedrich says. “Going forward, Cisco’s goals will continue to be defined by the needs of countries as they evolve, and the end is nowhere in sight.”
To learn more about how Cisco is helping tackle humanitarian challenges around the world, including homelessness, energy poverty, inequality, sustainability concerns, and more, read the 2022 Cisco Purpose Report.
This story was produced by WIRED Brand Lab for Cisco.
