Cisco and Mercy Corps just lately accomplished a five-year Technology for Impact partnership centered on delivering humanitarian support and growth help sooner, higher and to extra individuals around the globe by accelerating digital options. There’s so much to have fun and mirror on, particularly as we middle our power on our new partnership targeted on fostering local weather adaptation and resilience within the Horn of Africa.
Below is a dialog I had just lately with Carolyn Florey, Senior Director of Mercy Corps’ Technology for Development Team, reflecting on our transformational partnership, and looking out ahead to what’s subsequent.
Carolyn: Mercy Corps and Cisco have been partnering for 15 years! Our most up-to-date five-year Technology for Impact partnership reached greater than 12 million individuals throughout 45 nations, and it has additionally influenced the broader humanitarian and growth sector, and Mercy Corps’ capability as a corporation. What outcomes are you most happy with?
Erin: I’ve liked seeing the applications evolve through the years — from the earliest proof of ideas and pilots, to some initiatives being replicated throughout different areas and scaled throughout the group. The advantage of a multi-year partnership is that it has afforded us the time to check options, to pivot and adapt when issues don’t go as deliberate, and to scale initiatives that gained traction and had an influence. In many circumstances, we now have recognized new purposes and alternatives to use these options to challenges we hadn’t even anticipated on the partnership’s outset. When COVID-19 hit in 2020, for instance, we noticed how important know-how options have been to proceed supporting susceptible populations. Mercy Corps was nicely positioned to reply, leveraging our work constructing digital communities to ship trusted and dependable data on COVID-19, and our initiatives to digitize money and vouchers to ship money help faster and extra effectively to these in dire want.
We see our funding as catalytic, so it has been gratifying to see this borne out by our Technology for Impact partnership. Our assist has allowed Mercy Corps to put money into its individuals, instruments, and tech-based programming to drive better effectivity and influence. In doing so, Mercy Corps has been in a position to display the worth of this assist, leading to better institutional funding, further funding and new partnerships which have helped additional scale these efforts. It’s unbelievable to see Cisco-supported know-how initiatives now embedded in 116 Mercy Corps applications in 45 nations!
Erin: How about you, Carolyn? Which initiatives do you’re feeling have particularly moved the needle for Mercy Corps’ work?
Carolyn: The Technology for Impact partnership was extremely distinctive in that it touched every little thing from operations to innovation. You used the phrase “catalytic” to explain Cisco’s funding — and it has actually been a catalyst for bettering how Mercy Corps operates as a corporation. Our monitoring and analysis (MEL) work is a robust instance of this. As humanitarians, we work in very complicated and fragile environments. These embrace communities experiencing battle from armed teams, acute starvation, and far uncertainty. Program monitoring and evaluating is important to the success of our work, as a result of it permits us to know if our applications are creating the meant influence we search, and actually supporting individuals in quickly evolving conditions. Digitizing and automating our MEL processes has been a recreation changer for our program groups, permitting us to have a richer, extra full understanding of our applications’ influence a lot sooner.
Carolyn: In what methods are you hoping to see the partnership construct on its successes and learnings as we concentrate on one of the vital urgent points we collectively face: local weather change?
Erin: I imagine there’s a direct hyperlink between local weather change and humanitarian crises. We know that communities in low-income nations are disproportionately affected by local weather change and lack the assets to adapt and reply to an growing variety of crises that may be exacerbated by local weather change, resembling floods and drought. Mercy Corps’ new 10-year Pathway to Possibility technique, centered round constructing resilient communities, resonated with Cisco and mirrored our elevated concentrate on addressing local weather change and constructing resilience.
Mercy Corps works on a few of right this moment’s hardest challenges, with communities which are on the forefront of the local weather disaster. Over the course of our Technology for Impact partnership, Mercy Corps has examined, tailored, and utilized revolutionary know-how options to enhance the way in which they ship support. It due to this fact made sense that we expanded our partnership, constructing on what we’ve realized and developed, and see how we will apply this strategy and know-how to assist communities adapt and construct resilience to their altering environments. I’m hoping that, as with our Technology for Impact partnership, we will leverage the actions and applied sciences from our work within the Horn of Africa, and apply these to different areas and communities equally affected by local weather change.
Erin: Carolyn, I’d love to listen to your perspective on this. How do you see know-how taking part in a job in Mercy Corps’ local weather resilience work?
Carolyn: There are a number of methods our current work might be expanded and tailored to construct local weather resilience. For instance, we will mix digital money funds with our disaster evaluation work to make computerized funds upfront of extreme climate. We can present digital early warning alerts earlier than these crises happen, and in addition digital data afterwards in order that the communities we work with have the data they should entry providers and assist. Technology opens the door for us to construct and obtain local weather resilience from a number of angles, lots of that are already mirrored in our work.
In Kenya, by our new partnership with Cisco, we’re growing the uptake and use of digital data providers and instruments amongst key decision-makers to allow them to make data-informed selections to fight the results of local weather change — which in Kenya, appears like extreme drought. We see potential in scaling this strategy to the broader Horn of Africa area and past.
Carolyn: We just lately had the chance to go to Wajir, Kenya collectively and see a few of our local weather adaptation programming in motion. What have been some highlights of that have for you?
Erin: The spotlight of those visits is all the time assembly the individuals: the native Mercy Corps staff, their authorities and neighborhood companions, and possibly most essential, the agropastoralists, whose lives and livelihoods are most impacted by local weather change. It was extremely shifting to see the drought firsthand, and to take heed to the tales and views of these affected. While in some methods disheartening, it was additionally inspiring to see the various methods by which Mercy Corps is partnering with these communities to adapt to their altering setting, and innovate to enhance their livelihoods.
Another spotlight (for the expertise, not essentially the style): making an attempt heat camel milk, a Wajir staple!
Carolyn: Combating local weather change is likely to be crucial problem of our lifetime, and one which clearly can’t be solved by one group alone. How is Cisco addressing local weather change? What position do you suppose these partnerships play in tackling world points?
Erin: Cisco’s objective is to “Power an Inclusive Future for All” — and that additionally means by and with all. Collaboration with companions massive and small, world and native, has all the time been a part of our strategy to driving lasting and systemic change. One space the place Cisco has the potential to make a significant influence is with our prospects. How can we assist them use our merchandise and options to cut back their environmental footprint and obtain their sustainability objectives? We are working to cut back the power consumption of our merchandise, and construct them utilizing round design ideas that may lengthen their life cycle and scale back the quantity of supplies they require. But past that, we are going to proceed to have a look at how we will proceed to accomplice with organizations like Mercy Corps — as a result of we now have seen that once we mix the energy of the humanitarian sector’s experience with our core competencies in know-how and connectivity, we will have a deeper and longer-lasting influence.
Note: Photos courtesy of Mercy Corps
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