AGCG Genuine Consulting Group Insight – between rising risk exposure, digital sovereignty and transformation opportunities across the African continent.
Topic : Cybersecurity in Africa, digital sovereignty & digital transformation
Consulting Firm : AGCG Genuine Consulting Group
Cybersecurity in Africa has entered a new phase: attack volumes have surged by more than 300 % in just a few years. Critical infrastructure, financial services, telecom operators and public administrations are now recurrent targets.
Behind these figures lies a dual reality: a growing risk, but also a historic opportunity to design modern cyber capabilities, tailored to the local context and directly aligned with the continent’s development ambitions.
For a long time, cybersecurity in Africa was viewed as a secondary concern, overshadowed by challenges related to access to energy, water or physical infrastructure. That era is now over. The accelerated digitalization of everyday use cases (mobile payments, e-government, public cloud, high-speed connectivity) now positions cybersecurity at the core of sovereignty and economic competitiveness.
Attack volumes are exploding, ransomware campaigns are multiplying, and fraud targeting financial systems is becoming increasingly sophisticated. Yet at the same time, organizations that tackle the challenge head-on can leapfrog several maturity stages and build next-generation cyber capabilities, unconstrained by legacy technical debt.
For AGCG Genuine Consulting Group, the continent is entering a potential new golden age for cybersecurity: one where system protection becomes both a resilience imperative and a driver of growth.
Africa is one of the regions where digital adoption is growing the fastest: digital financial services, e-commerce platforms, e-health, e-government, and thriving start-up ecosystems. This momentum naturally creates a massive increase in attack surfaces.
Yet many organizations have digitized faster than they have structured their cybersecurity. The result: hybrid infrastructures, Cloud architectures sometimes poorly governed and legacy IT processes no longer aligned with the current threat landscape.
There is not one African cybersecurity reality, but many different ones. Some banks and telecom operators have maturity levels comparable to leading European players. Conversely, some administrations, municipalities or mid-sized operators remain lightly equipped, with limited dedicated resources.
This contrast shapes the core challenge of the next few years: raising the average level of maturity, while enabling the most advanced organizations to industrialize their SOC, governance and incident response capabilities.
The rapid adoption of global Cloud services and large SaaS platforms places many African organizations in a position of technological dependency. This brings significant benefits (speed, performance, innovation) but also raises major questions around sovereignty, data localization and control capability.
The objective is not to reject these technologies, but to embed them within a robust governance framework: security policies, contractual clauses, privileged access oversight, and alignment with national and regional regulations.
Many African organizations face a significant shortage of qualified cybersecurity professionals: few experienced SOC managers, a limited number of specialists in governance or secure architecture, and high turnover among scarce talents.
Without a clear strategy for skills development (reskilling, training programs, career pathways) and structuring partnerships, the risk is to remain trapped in a reactive “cyberfirefighter” mode instead of building sustainable, long-term capabilities.
Many African countries are strengthening their legal frameworks (cybersecurity laws, data protection, critical infrastructure, incident notification requirements). This dynamic is positive, but it remains heterogeneous, and organizations often need clear operational translations: what must be done, with which resources, and within which timelines.
The challenge is to move from a purely compliance-driven perspective to a broader governance & resilience approach: using regulatory requirements as an opportunity to strengthen processes, responsibilities and key indicators.
Building SOCs (Security Operations Centers) or managed detection and response services is a critical lever, but simply replicating European or North American models does not work. African organizations require context-specific models: connectivity constraints, budgets, time zones, perimeter diversity, and local regulatory obligations.
The most effective setups combine modern detection technologies (SIEM, EDR, XDR, SOAR…) with a local presence: on-the-ground understanding, coaching of internal teams, and the ability to upskill local cybersecurity talent.
In the Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo, digital transformation is accelerating: modernization of banking systems, digitalization of public administrations, development of critical infrastructure (energy, transportation, telecom). This momentum creates an urgent need for robust cybersecurity governance frameworks, local detection capabilities (SOCs), and long-term training programs embedded within the local ecosystem.
This is precisely where a large part of Central Africa’s digital sovereignty is at stake: the ability to protect critical infrastructure, control data flows, and develop cyber skills locally, rather than relying exclusively on external expertise.
The DNA of AGCG is that of a cybersecurity and IT strategy consulting firm. Our engagements in Africa are systematically framed around business imperatives: continuity of financial services, customer trust, territorial attractiveness, regulatory compliance, institutional reputation and credibility.
Instead of imposing a one-size-fits-all model, we design realistic and context-sensitive roadmaps with our clients, considering their budget, organizational structure and technical footprint.
To accelerate this momentum, AGCG has entered into an exclusive cybersecurity partnership with Skytech Congo (skytechcongo.cg) for the Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo. This partnership combines AGCG’s SecOps and governance expertise with Skytech Congo’s local presence, integration capabilities and extensive regional network.
Concretely, this enables:
AGCG is also a partner of the Brazza Cybersecurity Forum (forumbrazzacybersecurity.cg), which will take place on 26–27 November in Brazzaville. This event brings together institutions, companies, experts and technology partners around a shared ambition: strengthening the continent’s digital resilience.
The participation of AGCG and Skytech Congo in this forum reflects a strong belief: cybersecurity in Africa is built over time, through dialogue between public and private stakeholders, the sharing of experience, and the creation of structuring partnerships.
The more than 300 % increase in cyberattacks across the African continent is not just a number: it reflects a rapid acceleration of digital dependency and an escalation in threat sophistication.
Yet far from being condemned to endure this pressure, Africa holds a unique advantage: the ability to design modern cybersecurity capabilities from the ground up, shaped around local realities, aligned with national development ambitions, and supported by strong, long-term partnerships.
This is the commitment of AGCG alongside Skytech Congo and regional stakeholders: to make cybersecurity not a constraint, but a driver of trust, sovereignty and growth for African organizations.
The question is no longer whether cybersecurity is a priority in Africa: it is now at the heart of the continent’s development agenda.