Mercy Ships’ Cargo Day 2025 Targets Record $2.5m as Cisco and Presidio Power Floating Hospitals

On 27 November 2025, Mercy Ships’ flagship fundraising event, Cargo Day, is on track for its biggest haul yet – and this year’s push is tightly linked to a major digital upgrade of the charity’s floating hospital fleet, powered by Cisco and systems integrator Presidio. ^[1]

According to fresh updates from multiple outlets today, the 2025 Cargo Day campaign has already passed $1.6 million in pledges since opening on 5 November, with organisers confident they can beat last year’s total of around $2.2 million and hit a record $2.5 million target by year‑end. ^[2]

What Is Mercy Ships’ Cargo Day?

Mercy Ships Cargo Day is an annual online fundraising initiative where the global shipping and trading community turns everyday business into life‑saving medical care. Each November, charterers, shipowners, shipbrokers, port agents and inspection companies pledge support by: ^[3]

Nominating “Mercy Cargoes” – selected cargoes whose commissions are partially donated
Contributing a portion of freight and fixture commissions
Making direct donations or fixed annual pledges

Those funds keep Mercy Ships’ two hospital vessels – the Africa Mercy and the Global Mercy, the world’s largest civilian/NGO hospital ship – operating along the African coast, providing free surgery and medical training in countries where safe surgical care is often out of reach. ^[4]

Since the first Cargo Day in 2016, more than 150 companies have taken part, helping raise around $15 million for Mercy Ships’ work. ^[5]

2025 Campaign: $1.6m Raised and a Record in Sight

Today’s reports from maritime and general news outlets paint a consistent picture: Cargo Day 2025 is pacing ahead of all previous years. ^[6]

Key figures as of 27 November 2025:

$1.6m+ already raised since the campaign opened on 5 November 2025
Target: $2.5m by 31 December
Expected to surpass last year’s $2.2m+ total, itself a record at the time

Coverage from Splash247, SSBCrack News and El‑Balad all highlight how momentum from across tankers, dry bulk, shipowners, terminals, agents, suppliers and service providers is accelerating as year‑end approaches. ^[7]

A notable contribution comes from the “Bulk for Mercy” initiative, which mobilises the dry bulk sector. As of the latest public tally, Bulk for Mercy alone has raised just under $295,000 in 2025 through pledges and cargo commissions. ^[8]

A 10th Anniversary Marked by Tribute and Growth

This year’s Cargo Day is especially symbolic: 2025 marks the event’s 10th anniversary. ^[9]

The initiative traces back to the late Tim Webb of BRS, who championed the idea of using commercial tanker business to fund surgery in Africa. His concept was simple but powerful:

Encourage tanker charterers to nominate cargoes as “Mercy Cargoes”
Ask brokers to donate 50% of their commission on those fixtures
Invite charterers to match those contributions

What began as a tanker‑focused experiment is now a sector‑wide movement that includes dry bulk operators, shipowners and builders, terminals, agents, suppliers and service providers. Many companies now run their own internal fundraisers or commit fixed annual amounts, embedding Cargo Day into their corporate culture. ^[10]

Where the Money Goes: Surgeries and Skills for Africa

Cargo Day funding flows directly into Mercy Ships’ medical and training programmes across Africa. The charity focuses on two big gaps: access to safe surgery and long‑term healthcare capacity.

According to today’s coverage and Mercy Ships’ own impact data, Cargo Day contributions help fund: ^[11]

Thousands of free surgeries each year, including
- Cataract operations
- Cleft lip and palate surgery
- Complex orthopaedic and maxillofacial procedures
Intensive training programmes for hundreds of African healthcare workers annually, focusing on surgical skills, anaesthesia, nursing and sterile techniques
Upgrades and maintenance for the Africa Mercy and Global Mercy, ensuring they remain high‑standard hospital environments

Mercy Ships notes that over recent decades it has provided more than 100,000 free surgical procedures and trained upwards of 40,000 medical professionals in Africa – numbers that are set to climb as the Global Mercy and future ships scale up operations.

All of this is set against a sobering backdrop: an estimated tens of millions of people die every year worldwide due to lack of access to surgical care, with the overwhelming majority in sub‑Saharan Africa.

Tech Meets Purpose: Cisco and Presidio Rewire Mercy Ships’ Digital Backbone

A crucial parallel story this week is the technology partnership behind Mercy Ships’ expanding impact. In a detailed guest column published on 25 November, SiliconANGLE highlighted how Mercy Ships, Cisco and global IT solutions provider Presidio are re‑engineering the digital infrastructure on board the charity’s vessels. ^[12]

Floating hospitals with complex IT needs

Mercy Ships currently operates two main hospital ships:

Global Mercy – currently in Sierra Leone
Africa Mercy – serving Madagascar

Each ship functions like a small city with more than 800 people on board, including medical staff, crew, volunteers and families. The vessels must simultaneously support: ^[13]

Full surgical and clinical operations
Accommodation and life‑support services
Logistics, warehousing and food services
Education for volunteers’ children and training for local clinicians

They do this while docked in ports where:

Internet connectivity is limited, high‑latency and prone to outages
Power quality can be inconsistent
Steel bulkheads create a kind of “floating Faraday cage”, complicating Wi‑Fi coverage

Two onboard data centres, 1,600 phones and AI at the edge

To cope with these constraints, Cisco and Presidio have designed a robust, mostly on‑premises infrastructure for Mercy Ships. According to the SiliconANGLE report: ^[14]

Each vessel now has two onboard data centres for redundancy
The network relies almost entirely on Cisco hardware, including:
- Multiple intermediate distribution frames (IDFs)
- Extensive switch stacks and Wi‑Fi infrastructure
- Around 1,600 Cisco IP phones across the fleet
Core clinical and operational systems – from operating‑room equipment and cameras to telepresence units – all run on this Cisco backbone

Because satellite links to shore are slow and expensive, the strategy is to move as much compute as possible onto the ships themselves. That includes installing GPUs to support AI‑driven clinical tools and monitoring systems directly on board, instead of relying on cloud‑based processing. ^[15]

Telemedicine, training and future AI tools

Connectivity still matters, especially for telemedicine and remote training. Mercy Ships uses Webex and other telepresence platforms so surgeons can consult specialists around the world and so international faculty can train local medical teams even when they’re not physically on the ship. These sessions demand stable links in ports where bandwidth is anything but predictable. ^[16]

Looking ahead, Cisco’s new Cisco IQ platform – unveiled at the company’s recent Partner Summit – could give Mercy Ships a single pane of glass over their entire technology estate, using AI “agents” to optimise bandwidth, track device health and manage software lifecycles. This kind of automation is critical when the IT staff is small, the environment is remote and every minute of downtime can impact patient care. ^[17]

Cisco and Presidio are also helping plan for Africa Mercy II, a new ship expected to enter service around 2028. Long build cycles mean the technology chosen today must stay relevant for a decade or more, despite rapid advances in networking, AI and medical equipment. ^[18]

Cargo Day 2025: Shipping’s Response to a Global Health Gap

When you put the fundraising and technology stories together, a clear narrative emerges:

Cargo Day 2025 is on course to raise more money than ever before, with a $2.5m target in sight and more than $1.6m already pledged by late November. ^[19]
Sub‑campaigns like Bulk for Mercy show how individual market segments – in this case dry bulk – are organising themselves to contribute hundreds of thousands of dollars on top of the main effort. ^[20]
At the same time, Cisco and Presidio’s infrastructure upgrades are making Mercy Ships’ floating hospitals more resilient, more connected and ready to use advanced tools like AI at the edge. ^[21]

For patients in countries such as Sierra Leone and Madagascar, this combination of financial support and technical capability translates into something very concrete:

Shorter waiting lists
Safer surgeries
Better‑trained local medical teams who can continue delivering care long after the ship has sailed

How Companies Can Still Get Involved in 2025

Although Cargo Day’s official date has passed, the 2025 campaign remains open until the end of the year, and organisers are still encouraging new pledges. Companies across the maritime value chain can: ^[22]

Pledge a donation via the official Cargo Day website
Designate Mercy Cargoes and donate a portion of freight or fixture commissions
Join dedicated initiatives such as Bulk for Mercy in the dry bulk segment
Run internal matching schemes to double employee and client contributions

Participants are recognised publicly on the Cargo Day platform, underscoring how wide the industry’s support has become and encouraging others to follow. ^[23]

As 2025’s campaign moves into its final month, the maritime sector’s challenge is clear: turn pledges into a record‑breaking total that not only keeps Mercy Ships’ hospitals running but also ensures their new, Cisco‑powered digital backbone can be fully leveraged for years to come.