Powering resilient communities through technology 

In 2024, opportunity, disruption, and innovation intersected and accelerated at a previously unimagined pace. As a global community, we began to embrace AI to elevate work, government, economies, and the environment. But we also had to meet the accompanying risks – a widening digital divide, cyber threats, and the technology’s vast energy consumption. With over 60 countries gearing up for elections and new administrations, the political landscape added complexity, as did the global shortage of skilled talent. All these forces at play showed us again why resilience is so important.

Looking back at the year, I reaffirmed some established beliefs and intentions:

At the same time, I’ve never felt a stronger need to do things differently – to think about “resilience” in a new way, take a holistic approach, and build agile, data-driven models to guide and scale our work around the world, for decades to come.

In almost 30 years at Cisco, I have come to see that resilience is more than just surviving adversity. Resilience is a set of conditions and capabilities that enable a system to convert disruption into opportunities for growth and innovation. But resilience can only exist when a community has equitable access to opportunity and the potential to thrive – an aspiration of humans throughout history. Today, we face the difficult truth that most of the world’s communities aspire to be resilient, yet they face almost insurmountable challenges. The gap in global resiliency is widening as technology accelerates.

Today, technology is tightly integrated with resiliency, providing the access and capabilities needed to be connected and participate in society. But everything depends on having a secure, high-quality connection. Some 2.6 billion people around the world are still without internet access, and even among those that are connected there are disparities in quality and affordability. Fixed-broadband internet needed for data-intensive apps is prohibitively expensive, if available at all. 3G – not even 4G – remains the prevalent mobile technology in less economically developed countries.

Reliably connecting populations is the first step towards inclusion, but connectivity without security only widens the digital divide and increases the vulnerability of all populations. We know that public-private partnerships and the relationships we’ve cultivated through a collaborative approach are vital to addressing this issue. When we take a holistic view that recognizes our interconnectedness, we can better understand why helping vulnerable communities become resilient matters to us all.

A resilient ecosystem is one where people have access to opportunity, live in a healthy, safe, inclusive environment harmoniously with nature, and have the conditions in place to adapt to an ever-changing and complex economic, technological, and political environment.

Every community is unique and requires a different set of “building blocks” to harness and maintain resilience. Similarly, each is making the journey at a different pace. Many developing nations face a greater number of obstacles to resilience as they strive to meet basic, critical human needs. Other countries have more building blocks in place, and can turn towards advancing innovation, high-level upskilling, and global leadership in areas like inclusion, AI readiness, and cybersecurity. We have to ask ourselves, “What does resilience really mean to each individual community, how do we support communities holistically, and what is the best way for us to pursue our work in a targeted way that delivers real value?”

We can answer these questions with the help of Cisco’s Resilient Ecosystems Framework, which enables us to assess current state and needs, choose communities or countries of focus, determine technology’s role, decide on actions and investments, and most importantly – measure and adjust our efforts to make sure we maximize our impact now and into the future.

At the heart of the framework is the Resilient Ecosystem Index, which expands on Cisco’s Digital Readiness Index. Using the REI, we consolidate data and insights for the five key dimensions shown below, to arrive at a unique “resilience factor” for each community.

Each year in Cisco’s Purpose Report we show how we are leveraging the force of our people, our technology, and our trusted partnerships to power an inclusive future for all. This year we announced the launch of “40 Communities”; our vision is to engage, support, and invest in 40 communities around the world. We plan to expand upon existing offerings and contributions – including funding, technology, and expertise – in both communities where we’re currently engaged, and newly identified communities. Most importantly, we'll tap into our community of partners-on-the-ground: experts who truly understand a community's biggest needs, goals, and opportunities, and who can help us best determine how we can create the greatest impact.

We aim to build a legacy that contributes a model for driving resilience and true systems change based on lasting and enduring relationships – engaging, supporting and investing to power an inclusive future for all.