There’s a story that Guy Diedrich, Cisco’s SVP and Global Innovation Officer, tells about two young men who walked into one of the company’s EDGE Centres in South Africa. They wanted to learn about Cisco. They got their CCNA. Then they came back and did their CCNP. Then they applied to become a reseller of Cisco equipment. They are now the largest Cisco reseller in South Africa. Diedrich tells it at Cisco Live 2026 in Las Vegas without ornamentation, the way you tell a story you’ve told before but still believe in. It’s the kind of anecdote that gets used to illustrate a programme’s potential, and it does that, but it also quietly illustrates something else: the distance between what a certification can open and what a person can build once the door is open, and why that distance matters enormously when you’re trying to understand what digital skills training actually does.
Cisco launched the Networking Academy in 1997. That makes it nearly 30 years old, which is worth pausing on. Most of the digital skills programmes currently being announced for Africa, by hyperscalers, by telcos, by development finance institutions, have existed for less time than it takes to complete a degree. The Networking Academy has been running in South Africa long enough that the students who passed through it in the early years are now mid-career professionals. It has trained, by Diedrich’s count at Cisco Live, 600,000 South Africans. An ITWeb report from late 2024 put the cumulative total at 411,000, which means the programme added roughly 200,000 students in under two years. Whatever the Networking Academy is doing, more people are choosing to do it.
That appetite matters because the alternative reading of those numbers, that a programme running for nearly three decades in a country with 60.9% youth unemployment for the 15-24 age group has failed, would be too simple. According to Statistics South Africa’s Q1 2026 data, for every young South African with a job, 2.7 don’t have one. The NEET rate for young people aged 15-24 sits at 37.6%, meaning more than a third are not in employment, education, or training at all. Young women are faring worse than young men, and the gap is widening. These are not numbers that a corporate skills programme was ever designed to fix. They describe a structural condition that certification can help individuals navigate but cannot, by itself, alter. Diedrich knows this. He doesn’t claim otherwise, which is one of the things that makes talking to him more useful than reading a Cisco press release.
What the Networking Academy offers is narrower and more honest than its promotional language sometimes suggests. Students who complete certification-aligned courses report, according to Diedrich, a 97% rate of one of three outcomes: finding a job, earning a promotion, or accessing further education. The global figure runs between 94% and 97%, with South Africa the highest of any country. Diedrich can’t fully explain why. The hunger is there, he says, and he means it as observation rather than slogan. The figure is self-reported and the definition is broad; a student who enrols in a short course after completing their CCNA satisfies the third category just as much as someone who gets hired at a network operations centre. But the consistency of the number across nearly 30 years and 190 countries makes it harder to dismiss than a single-year headline from a recently launched initiative. Cisco has been measuring this long enough that the data has texture.
The EDGE Centres are the less-publicised layer of Cisco’s South African infrastructure, and they’re where the two young men in Diedrich’s story actually came from. The Networking Academy certifies people. The EDGE Centres are designed to do something more complicated: to create environments where a certification becomes a starting point rather than an endpoint. Mentorship, connections to entrepreneurial networks, support for standing up a business, pathways to higher certifications, access to the kinds of relationships that turn technical knowledge into economic participation. Diedrich describes them as the first time Cisco was able to go beyond the Academy itself. The gold partner story is the most dramatic illustration of what that can produce, and Diedrich is careful not to present it as typical. The conditions that converged for those two men, their drive, the quality of the centre they walked into, the timing, the support structure around them, aren’t guaranteed to converge for everyone who shows up. What the EDGE Centre did was make the conditions possible. That’s a different and more defensible claim than promising replicable outcomes.
The next iteration of the Networking Academy will embed an AI tutor directly into the coursework, available throughout as a subject-matter expert on demand. In a country where qualified instruction has never been evenly distributed, where a student working through networking fundamentals at a community institution in Mthatha is navigating the material without the kind of responsive, knowledgeable support that students in better-resourced environments take for granted, the value of this is concrete rather than theoretical. It doesn’t solve device access or connectivity. It doesn’t address the structural conditions that make the labour market so difficult to enter. But it addresses something real at the instructional layer for the students who get that far, and it does so at a scale that human instructors alone couldn’t reach.
Diedrich’s broader argument, the one that frames all of this inside a larger claim about what’s at stake, is worth engaging with seriously rather than filing under corporate purpose language. He describes a world in which the connected 70% of the global population are accelerating away from the unconnected 30%, not gradually but at the pace of agentic AI, 500 billion connected devices, quantum computing arriving as a commercial reality by the end of the decade. The unconnected aren’t being left behind in a fixed relationship to everyone else. The gap is compounding. His phrase for what follows is that they won’t be silent, which is as direct an acknowledgement as you’ll hear from a technology executive about what digital exclusion produces in societies already under pressure. It isn’t a philanthropic observation. It’s a reading of political risk, and it reflects an understanding of what happens when a significant portion of any population watches prosperity accelerate past them without being included in it.
South Africa is, in this sense, a compressed version of the global problem. The Networking Academy has been running here for nearly 30 years. Youth unemployment for the 15-24 age group sits at 60.9%. Both of those things are true, and they don’t cancel each other out. Certification programmes work on individuals; structural unemployment is a different order of problem, shaped by investment flows, labour market policy, education infrastructure, and economic history that no corporate skills initiative is positioned to address on its own. What Cisco has, and what distinguishes it from the companies currently making five-year pledges for Africa, is a programme old enough and deep enough to have produced the two young men in that EDGE Centre story, and the infrastructure that made what came after their first certification possible. The pledge-makers are promising to build something. Cisco is already maintaining it. Whether what it’s maintaining is growing fast enough, and whether the EDGE Centre model can scale to the point where that gold partner story stops being exceptional, are questions the data doesn’t yet answer.