CyberSafe Foundation has unveiled Resilio Africa, a three-year cybersecurity resilience initiative aimed at strengthening institutions and communities against escalating cyber threats across Sub-Saharan Africa.
Speaking at the launch in Lagos, Confidence Staveley, Founder and Executive Director of CyberSafe Foundation, said the project will support 200 Critical Community Institutions in Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa.
The initiative is projected to protect more than 2 million people and secure over 15 million public records across the four countries.
Funded by Google.org, Resilio Africa will provide participating institutions with free cybersecurity tools, risk assessments, threat intelligence, and incident response frameworks to improve their ability to prevent, detect, and respond to attacks.
According to Staveley, many public and nonprofit institutions operate with outdated or unpatched systems, limited cybersecurity budgets, and little or no dedicated technical staff.
Beyond these visible gaps, she identified deeper structural weaknesses including:
- Limited cyber-risk quantification
- Rare incident response simulations
- Weak business continuity planning
- Fragmented security policies
- Poor integration of cybersecurity into digital transformation strategies
“The result is that many organisations can detect threats, but far fewer can respond quickly, reduce impact, or maintain operations during sustained attacks,” she said.
Staveley noted that while awareness of cyber risks is increasing across Africa, action often stalls when financial commitments are required.
“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.
She explained that the hesitation is driven largely by financial constraints rather than lack of intent.
“One of the major reasons is not just lack of will, but limited financial capacity to fund the necessary protections,” she added.
To bridge this gap, Resilio Africa will deliver 10,000 consulting hours from cybersecurity experts across the four countries at no cost to participating institutions. Staveley said the commercial value of these services would exceed $1 million, a cost offset by Google.org’s support.
The initiative comes amid a surge in cyberattacks across Sub-Saharan Africa.
Citing a recent Kaspersky threat report, Staveley revealed that the region recorded more than 42 million web attacks and 95 million malware-based on-device attacks in the first half of 2025 alone.
Particularly concerning, she said, is the dominance of:
- Spyware
- Password-stealing malware
- Backdoor tools
Password-stealing malware alone has increased by over 60 per cent, reflecting growing sophistication among threat actors.
In East Africa, the scale is even more alarming. Kenya recorded 2.5 billion cyber-threat events in the first quarter of 2025, driven largely by phishing attacks, mobile money fraud, and misconfigured cloud systems.
“These are not abstract numbers. They directly affect institutions that people rely on every day,” Staveley stressed.
The launch of Resilio Africa coincides with new cybersecurity efforts by the Nigerian government.
The Federal Government is expected to roll out a new cybersecurity framework this year aimed at curbing rising AI-driven attacks targeting banks, businesses, and government agencies.
According to the Director-General of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Kashifu Inuwa, the framework will introduce:
- Minimum cybersecurity spending thresholds
- Mandatory timelines for reporting data breaches
- Threat intelligence sharing systems
- Coordinated national response protocols
The government argues that many organisations currently underinvest in cybersecurity because they assume they are unlikely targets.
