A Non-Governmental Organisation, CyberSafe Foundation, has unveiled a three-year cybersecurity resilience initiative, Resilio Africa, aimed at strengthening the capacity of critical institutions across Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana and South Africa to tackle rising cyber threats.
The Executive Director of the Foundation, Ms Confidence Staveley, announced the launch at the inauguration of the initiative in Lagos on Wednesday.
Staveley said the project would support 200 Critical Community Institutions across the four countries, with the goal of protecting more than two million people and securing over 15 million public records.
According to her, the initiative, backed by Google.org, will provide free cybersecurity tools, risk assessments, threat intelligence and incident response support to participating institutions.
She noted that many public and non-profit institutions operate outdated or unpatched systems, face limited security budgets and lack adequate technical personnel.
Beyond these operational gaps, Staveley highlighted deeper structural weaknesses, including poor cyber-risk quantification, limited incident response exercises and weak business continuity planning, which have increased institutional vulnerability.
“The result is that many organisations can detect threats, but fewer can respond quickly, reduce impact, or maintain operations during sustained attacks,” she said.
She observed that while awareness of cyber risks was growing across Africa, concrete action was often hindered by insufficient funding.
“In Africa, we are not lacking in general awareness that we have cyber risk issues. What happens is that the conversation drops off when it gets to the point of taking action,” she said.
Staveley added that financial constraints, rather than unwillingness alone, remain a major barrier to implementing robust cybersecurity measures.
To bridge this gap, she said Resilio Africa would deliver 10,000 hours of free consulting services from cybersecurity experts across the four countries, with the commercial value of the services estimated at over one million dollars.
The executive director noted that the intervention comes at a time of escalating cyber activity in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Citing a recent threat report, she said the region recorded more than 42 million web attacks and 95 million malware-based attacks in the first half of 2025.
She added that password-stealing malware had risen by over 60 per cent, while spyware and backdoor tools remained prevalent.
Staveley further disclosed that Kenya alone recorded 2.5 billion cyber-threat events in the first quarter of 2025, largely linked to phishing, mobile money fraud and cloud misconfigurations.
“These are not abstract numbers. They directly affect institutions that people rely on every day,” she said.
She explained that the initiative aligns with broader efforts by African governments, including Nigeria’s planned cybersecurity framework, which is expected to introduce minimum spending thresholds, mandatory breach reporting timelines and coordinated response mechanisms.
According to Staveley, strengthening institutional resilience is essential to safeguarding digital transformation gains across the continent.