Guarding Africa’s cyberspace

Africa is banking on the digital economy for growth and now more than ever with a growing reliance on innovation and Artificial Intelligence, which introvertedly implies that cybersecurity threats need to be mitigated.

Africa currently leads in the Fintech space with 14% of all Africans receiving money through mobile transfers, innocuously positioning mobile phones as a sitting duck target for cyber criminals.

It therefore goes without saying that policymakers need to develop and implement effective policies to mitigate cyber threats, beginning with aggressive engagement in awareness initiatives.

The required solution is to work towards building an African cybersecurity workforce.

“We are one click away from a hack”

According to the UN Capital Development Fund, financial inclusion is positioned prominently as an enabler of other developmental goals in the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, where it is featured as a target in eight of the seventeen goals.

There is a huge amount of projected growth in the African economy over the next five years.

To drive financial inclusion alongside that growth, experts say big improvements need to be made to the security and resilience of the continent’s financial technologies and infrastructure.

The CyLab-Africa initiative, a collaboration between Carnegie Mellon University’s CyLab Security and Privacy Institute and CMU-Africa, aims to improve the cybersecurity of financial systems in Africa and other emerging economies

The Global Cybersecurity Index (GCI), released in June 2021 by the International Telecommunication Union, reveals that Africa’s levels of commitment to cybersecurity and capacity for response to threats are low in comparison to other continents.

Africa records the youngest population in the world, home to approximately 1.2 billion people, with a median age of just 19.5 years.

This high youth population is continuously seeking social engagement, free expression, and increased global connectivity.

In addition, increased mobile device ownership, spiking social media use, and the Internet of Things (IoT) steadily becoming more of a norm, has to a large extent led to the exposure of new cyber risks and vulnerabilities.

CyLab-Africa has launched picoCTF-Africa, a free computer security competition for high school, undergraduate and graduate students across the African continent, it aims to introduce young minds to the field of cybersecurity and help them develop their cybersecurity skills by walking them through increasingly difficult challenges that mimic real-world cybersecurity problems.

The competition will run from March 15 to 22, 2022.

Cybersecurity enforcement is not duel or even a battle; it is a war that will require intentional collaboration of armies drawn from government, industry, and academia.

Winning this war necessitates the design and implementation of a continent-wide initiative that will develop skills that will enable the secure operation of critical infrastructures in Africa, such as communication systems, the power grid, water distribution systems, healthcare, transportation…just to mention a few.

Email: cylab-africa-kigali@andrew.cmu.edu

Website: https://www.africa.engineering.cmu.edu/research/cylab/index.html

Dr. Assane Gueye is an Assistant Teaching Professor at Carnegie Mellon University Africa and co-Director of the CyLab-Africa initiative. 

His research focuses in two main areas: performance evaluation and security of large-scale communication systems, and information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D).