While the opportunities for development are important, several African economies remain fragile and are still suffering from underdeveloped infrastructure and limited diversification of their productive structure. Let’s put into consideration why African countries should invest and explore the technological world and how it creates wealth, and what Africa must do to achieve this “new liberation” using its untapped natural wealth, human resources, and effective policy execution to create explosive wealth that by-passes Western-led globalization and creates national and continental technology hubs. This would reposition Africa in the technological system.
The secret that lies behind science and the prosperity of nations deals with innovative ideas. This is the most important secret of the wealth of the industrialized world. The constant pursuit of the economic and military advantage and superiority that scientific invention and technology confer is an essential component of a world-view that changes the realities on the ground. Western science led to the invention of gunpowder and other superior military weapons that outclassed bows, arrows, and spears. Combined with the development of shipping transportation, the west became intrepid explorers of the world, developed a world-view of racial superiority, which led it to achieve military and economic conquests that resulted in transatlantic slavery and colonialism.
It is difficult now to imagine life without electricity, refrigerators, cars, telephones, air-conditioners, railways, dishwashers, and many other everyday appliances that make life in the modern era convenient, comfortable, and more economically productive. But for millions of Africans, life without these inventions and the innovations based on them is still their daily reality.
According to Statista, Africa’s population is projected to reach nearly 2.5 billion by 2050, and most of this growth would happen in cities. Sub-Saharan Africa saw the world’s fastest rate of mobile broadband connections between 2008 and 2015, and mobile data traffic is expected to increase tenfold to one billion between 2017 and 2022.

Cybersecurity is fast becoming one of the key emerging business opportunities in Africa due to the potential damages and losses. It is one of the most prolific forms of international crime. In a 2019 report by Serianu, a cybersecurity and business consulting firm, it was revealed that Africa lost $3.5 billion to cyberattacks. According to the Africa Centre for Strategic Studies, up to 96% of cybersecurity incidents in Africa go unreported or unresolved — which implies that cyber threats on the continent are likely much worse than the official statistics.
Due to the lag in African digital capacity, government, individuals, and private organizations are always targeted. The attacks range from simple email scams to large-scale theft of customer data, malware, phishing, hosts, spam, C & C servers, fraud, ransomware, espionage, critical infrastructure sabotage, and other malicious activities. In June 2020, the Ethiopian information network security agency (INSA) thwarted a cyberattack from an Egypt-based actor known as the Cyber-Horus group. The group mounted a cyberattack on 37,000 computers in connection with Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD). The attack targeted 13 websites, including security agencies, public service institutions, and private companies.

Interestingly, a growing number of entrepreneurs on the continent are rising to the challenge. Bace API is one of the solutions targeting cybersecurity. The brain behind this product, Charlette N’Guessan, is a tech entrepreneur from Côte D’Ivoire and the first woman to win the United Kingdom’s Royal Academy of Engineering’s Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation. The software, which uses facial recognition and artificial intelligence to verify identities remotely, is targeted at financial institutions and other industries that rely on identity verification to reduce cybersecurity risks. Absa Cybersecurity Academy, a product of Absa Group is an EdTech founded to help address the worldwide security skills shortage. The South African academy seeks to establish Africa as the hub for global cybersecurity skills, through the accredited cybersecurity training alongside personal development to navigate the field.
Batswana startup, Augmenta Cyber Security utilizes cloud data services and provides proprietary solutions for securing personal and business data. Given that Africa finds herself in a pretty compromising position with cybercrimes, the startup seeks to be the pacemaker in offering the solutions catered for the African partners. WiRE Microsystems, an Egyptian-based startup launched in 2016, has a computer integrated system recovery software, XMACHINE as the flagship product. XMACHINE makes use of an advanced filesystem-wise technology that is copyrighted for WiRE Microsystems.
Research shows that cybersecurity companies in Africa are still very few, and the existing ones are underutilized. In order to tighten cybersecurity and reduce crimes, African governments can work in conjunction with the private sector. Mauritius, a country in East Africa, is often used as a reference for cybersecurity due to its legal and technical infrastructure, national training and awareness initiatives, its national cybersecurity agency, Computer Emergency Response Team of Mauritius [CERT-MU], and the involvement of public and private sectors in these efforts. Mauritius is currently ranked 17th on the global cybersecurity index (GCI) 2020. In the realm of cybersecurity, one of the main challenges facing the Government of Mauritius is the budget constraint. CERT-MU regularly organizes training around the country for cyber-related topics. There are also several universities in Mauritius offering cybersecurity degree programs.

Investment should be increased in this untapped sector to facilitate more change in the African cybersecurity space. INTERPOL is creating a new cybercrime desk, African Joint Operation against cybercrime, AFJOC with the timeframe to be between March 8, 2021, to February 28, 2023. The project aims to drive intelligence-led, coordinated actions against cybercrime and its perpetrators in African member countries, by creating a harmonized regional coordination framework that will produce joint operations, thereby strengthening Africa states’ capacity and capability to combat cybercrime.
There are opportunities for startups offering managed cybersecurity services, niche security, and forensics services, and for developers and innovators who build security into their solutions from the ground up. For example, KnowBe4 is involved in the GovX cybersecurity innovation challenge to drive innovation towards a more digitized and cyber-safe South Africa. Cybersecurity is a thriving field in the world and the industry is still quite young. As the saying, “African solutions to African problems” implies, we need progressive African visionaries to build this industry and help combat cybercrime.
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