Cisco’s first Praça do Conhecimento, or “Knowledge Square,” has been launched in Rio de Janeiro this week. The project is a collaboration between city officials and the Cisco Networking Academy; a global program that offers networking education and certification required in order to qualify for technical positions in this field. The first square is located in the Morro do Alemão section of the Brazilian city.

Cisco expects that over 300 students from the local Nova Brasília community will receive training throughout the first half of 2012.

“This relationship with the Housing Department in Praça do Conhecimento restates the Networking Academy’s social commitment to training young people in underprivileged communities, giving them access to the dynamic and growing IT sector. The growing Brazilian economy and the major events scheduled for the next few years will be major drivers in networks professionals’ careers,” said Rodrigo Abreu, CEO of Cisco in Brazil.

Cisco’s social responsibility initiative spans far beyond this latest expansion, and has been used to achieve the same goal in many other regions worldwide. In February the program reached a milestone, passing over one million trained annually, and a total of about four million to date. The program features two different modules: one designed for support representatives and technicians, and another designed for soon to be network engineers, consultants and other more specialized roles.

The Cisco Networking Academy has gone a long  way in the two decades that have passed since its foundation, and other companies in different industries are also striving to enhance their particular ecosystems. One of them is Cloudera, which offers the free Cloudera Connect Partner Program, which launched in August. The program is the most extensive of its kind in the Hadoop world, offering partners everything from training to marketing tools and other resources.