Reviewing National Cybersecurity Awareness for Users and Executives in Africa

TL;DR

This paper assesses the state of cybersecurity awareness campaigns in African countries, highlighting challenges and proposing best practices to enhance user and executive understanding of cyber risks to combat rising cybercrime.

Contribution

It provides an analysis of current awareness efforts in Africa and offers a framework of best practices for developing effective national cybersecurity awareness campaigns.

Findings

Limited implementation of awareness campaigns in African countries

Main obstacles include lack of capacity and resources

Recommendations for prioritizing awareness activities

Abstract

There is an unprecedented increase in cybercrime globally observed over the last years. One of the regions driving this increase is Africa, where significant financial losses are reported. Yet, citizens of African countries are not aware of the risks present in cyberspace. The design and implementation of national awareness campaigns by African countries to address this problem are in their infancy state, mainly due to the absence of capacity building efforts. As part of the Global Cybersecurity Capacity Centre (GCSCC) programme, we conducted a series of focus groups in six African countries, in order to assess their cybersecurity posture, a critical component of which is user and executive awareness of cyber risks. This paper is an extended version of previous work where an initial analysis of awareness for cyber risk in African countries was presented. In this extended version, we reflect on best practice approaches for developing national awareness campaigns and use these as a framework to analyse qualitative data from the focus groups. We discuss the current state of African countries with regards to the implementation of national cybersecurity awareness campaigns for. users and executives, the main obstacles in combating cybercrime and conclude with recommendations on how African countries can identify and prioritise activities to increase their capacity regarding cybersecurity awareness.