The digital revolution, which was announced a long time ago, is now well underway in Africa: mobile money, digitalization of services, explosion of e-commerce, accelerated development of teleworking. As a result, Africa's digital economy is expected to generate $180 billion by 2025, or 5.02% of the continent's GDP, and reach $712 billion by 2050 (8.5% of the region's GDP), according to the e-Conomy Africa report by Google and the International Finance Corporation (IFC). However, this fundamental technological transformation has not (for the time being) been followed by a corresponding effort in cybersecurity, a component that remains a structural weakness of the continent (poor awareness of economic operators and users, lack of specialized skills, deficient infrastructure ...). In September 2020, the antivirus company Kaspersky recalled that Africa had been the target of 28 million cyberattacks in the first eight months of the year 2020. In the same vein, a study conducted by the accounting firm EY & Associates in 2019-2020 estimated for its part that 37% of companies in French-speaking Africa do not have a department dedicated to cybersecurity.
Summits dedicated to this strategic issue
A summit on cybersecurity was to be held on October 25 and 26, 2021 in Lome (Togo), to address this major challenge. The event may have been postponed indefinitely, but the challenge of the meeting - "to better understand cybersecurity through a collaborative approach and sharing of resources" - remains as relevant as ever. "Now that the regulatory frameworks have mostly been implemented, we want to propose innovative ideas to promote operational cooperation and address threats in a concrete and decisive way. Our resources being limited, we have no choice but to work together," Cina Lawson, Togo’s Minister of Digital Economy and Transformation, said a few days before the announcement of the postponement of the summit. Earlier, it was the Cyber Africa Forum, held on June 7 in Abidjan (Côte d'Ivoire), which looked into this strategic issue. Franck Kié, the event's general commissioner, put at the time "Africa’s losses from these increasingly sophisticated computer attacks at 4 billion dollars", while stressing that "most threats [took advantage] of the lack of knowledge of the problem and, therefore, of human weaknesses.
Raising public and corporate awareness of the risks of cybercrime
However, "one of the first solutions is to raise public awareness so that as many people as possible figure out the risks that weigh on all African economic systems," says the cybersecurity specialist. It is precisely in order to raise public and corporate awareness of the risks of cybercrime, and therefore the need to protect against it, that Ivorian Cédric Tidiane Diarra has created the foundation “Génération Numérique”, a private initiative that aims to "guarantee the security of cyberspace and to capitalize on the digital transformation and the impact it can have for African economies," says the initiator of the project. For him, the roadmap is clear: SMEs and mid-sized companies - which constitute the vast majority of the African economic fabric - are not yet sufficiently protected digitally, they must be the priority target of cybersecurity stakeholders. With this in mind, Génération Numérique has already planned "to initiate an awareness campaign in person, with various actors in SMEs across Africa, and particularly in Côte d'Ivoire, to be able to shield them against these various attacks," confirms Cedric Tidiane Diarra, who also opened on October 15 a center for initiation into digital security in the orphanage of Bingerville, Abidjan. In this way, the foundation hopes to instill in the younger generation the right digital protection reflexes.
An African cybersecurity market growing from $0.92 billion to $2.32 billion between 2015 and 2020
And who knows, open their eyes to tomorrow’s professional opportunities: according to market research firm MarketsandMarkets, the African cybersecurity market would have grown from 0.92 billion to 2.32 billion dollars between 2015 and 2020. An almost three-fold market increase in just 5 years.