Lethabo Mokone is a born entrepreneur.

Growing up near Pretoria, South Africa, he helped his parents run their spaza shop, a type of informal convenience store. But he’d always been enamored with computers, so as an adult he decided to start his own business, a digital technologies company. In 2018, he landed a surprising partner: Cisco, the global tech leader with more than 80,000 employees in 95 countries.

The company had recently launched a local Cisco EDGE Incubation Center—EDGE stands for Experience, Design, Go-to-Market, Earn—which provides regional startups and their founders with IT training, mentorship, and technology resources. Using the EDGE Center, Mokone overcame the challenge of finding skilled workers. Soon, he grew his company, Makwa IT, to over 200 employees, and became a Cisco Gold Partner, the first 100 percent Black-youth-owned company in Africa to achieve the honor. “Our purpose is to drive a new era of technology information,” Mokone said, “an era that will create meaningful jobs and make a positive impact on the people of this great continent.”

Makwa IT is just one of dozens of companies, alongside hundreds of individuals, that have grown with the help of the EDGE Center in Pretoria, part of Cisco’s investment to help incubate and scale innovative solutions in Africa and around the world.

But Cisco’s commitment to having an impact goes beyond the entrepreneurial space and its EDGE Centers. In 2016, for example, the company set out to positively affect one billion people by 2025 through its Networking Academy program and social impact grants. This month, it announced that they have already positively impacted 1.1 billion people, a year ahead of schedule.

“Early on we felt like this goal might be a stretch,” says Francine Katsoudas, Executive Vice President and Chief People, Policy and Purpose Officer at Cisco. “But we realized that our core strengths as a company could intersect with an ambition to drive impact, creating momentum that’s scalable. It demonstrates what’s possible.”

As the company celebrates this milestone, here are few of the lessons Cisco and its employees have learned over the years in their ongoing quest to create positive change.

Building on Strengths to Drive Change

To achieve its billion people positively impacted goal, Cisco forged partnerships and supported hundreds of initiatives in nearly two hundred countries, in every region of the world. These represented a broad range of initiatives—upskilling workers, supporting disaster-relief solutions, educating children—but the programs all had one thing in common: they leveraged the company’s resources, technology, and expertise to create and scale unique solutions.

As a leader of the tech industry, Cisco has understood for decades how digital connectivity affects individuals and communities—and how many around the world still need to be brought online. Today, an estimated 2.6 billion people lack access to the internet. Closing that connectivity gap, PwC research suggests, can raise 7 percent of the world’s population above the poverty line, with a gain of $6.7 trillion to the global economy.

To extend connectivity, Cisco is collaborating with governments, industries, and academics through its Country Digital Acceleration program. To date, the CDA has launched over 1,300 projects in 50 countries, and works in tandem with the Cisco Networking Academy to build partnerships like a 2022 initiative with the White House to train 200,000 U.S. students in cybersecurity over the next three years. “According to current estimates, up to four million security roles are unfilled,” says Katsoudas. “It’s a really important need, and it could create incredible paths for people.”

Initiatives like this are helping newcomers, many without college degrees, launch careers in IT. Cisco’s Networking Academy courses include Internet of Things (IoT) security, network security, and cyber ops. And as the world changes with AI, Cisco is using its unique insights to help workers stay ahead of the curve.

“Technology is moving faster than people,” Katsoudas says. “Whether it’s within a company or a community, you have to be constantly reskilling. So as AI comes into its own, we will have to continue refreshing and expanding our skills offerings to address the latest issues.”

Leveraging Insights and Partnerships to Guide Initiatives

Working to impact one billion people, Cisco has learned that partnerships are key. Big multiyear goals can only be achieved by collaborating with other entities, whether business partners or simply companies aligned with the mission. “The more we shared our goals and learnings, the more we could encourage others to work together with us, or even learn from something we had done,” says Katsoudas.

Partnership has been critical in other efforts to improve both individual lives and the planet. Cisco has long focused on sustainability, for example, using its technology and know-how to develop and deploy smart grids capable of dispersing renewable energy—wind, solar, hydro, geothermal. In Italy, Cisco partnered with Enel Group, an Italian utility, to develop digital solutions like an IoT distributed sensor system for real-time maintenance of power substations. The ongoing project is helping to bring more renewable energy online while improving overall efficiency.

“We can optimize the operation of power grids by analyzing data on energy demand, supply, and storage,” says Katsoudas. “It’s also a testament to how we can create unique solutions at scale, because this is something that intersected many organizations at Cisco and allowed us to drive impact for our customers, and their customers, too.”

As the climate crisis intensifies, solving it will require ambitious efforts like this one, involving both public and private partners. Cisco is leaning into the challenge. In 2023, the company launched Plan for Possible, a new environmental sustainability strategy. Among its goals, Plan for Possible is dedicated to helping eliminate waste from product streams, creating new products from old ones, and to bolstering biodiversity around the globe with technology that can help protect and restore ecosystems. The ultimate goal is to create not just a sustainable future but a regenerative one, a world in which social and environmental systems heal and thrive.

Empowering Employees to Follow Their Passions

Throughout their journey to positively impact one billion people, Cisco has gained a clear insight: The desire to create change builds momentum. Last year, 85 percent of the company’s employees gave back to their communities. One of the more uplifting efforts was a grassroots effort on behalf of Covenant House, a nonprofit that helps teens experiencing homelessness find safe housing. In 2023, more than 700 Cisco employees participated in the organization’s annual Sleep Out, a fundraising challenge where participants give up their beds for a night in solidarity with those experiencing homelessness. Since 2014, Cisco has raised over $18 million for the charity through employee fundraising and donations.

“This was something our employees organized, orchestrated, and built momentum around for the entire company,” says Katsoudas. “It’s a great demonstration of the fact that anyone, anywhere can drive projects and initiatives that can have broad positive impact, both for your company and for the world.”

To create accountability for helping one billion people, Cisco devised clear parameters to measure impact. For example, the company doesn’t count the same person twice if they participated in both a reskilling program and another effort. It also partnered with PwC to independently tally its progress along the way. “We worked out a rigorous tracking methodology, because we wanted it to be audited,” says Katsoudas. “We wanted there to be no question about our impact.”

For Cisco, the end results are a testament to how even one positive impact can cascade into dozens or even thousands more—both inside and outside the company. “We believe that when you do these things to help communities, it actually helps your business,” says Katsoudas. “There’s a connection between good for the world and good for business, and you’ll see us spending a lot more time drawing on that connection—and demonstrating it for others.”

This story was produced by WIRED Brand Lab for Cisco.