In anticipation of the forthcoming Guardian Woman Festival (March 15 and March 16, 2024), a two-day event to be held at Federal Palace Hotel, Victoria Island, Lagos, we’re talking to women about this year’s theme: Inspiring Inclusion.
In this interview, we talk with Confidence Staveley, founder of the non-governmental, Cybersafe Foundation, dedicated to improving inclusive and safe digital access in Africa, especially for women.
What was the trigger to you starting the foundation?
My mother was a victim of cybercrime. Before that time, I was a cyber security professional doing most of my work around protecting enterprises from cybercrime. So, when it hit home as close as it did, I wanted fewer and fewer people to experience that sort of pain. I wanted to close the gap between what the corporate world was doing around cybersecurity challenges, both from the talent perspective and public awareness perspective. The Cybersafe Foundation is a leading nonprofit organisation driving safe and inclusive access to digital on the African continent.
The keywords are ‘safe access’ and ‘inclusion’ for the people typically left behind in the knowledge to protect themselves when using digital products. We also want to bring women into the cybersecurity field. Women currently only make up nine per cent of the cybersecurity workforce.
So, what does inclusion look like?
The three pillars I generally speak about, aside from policy and discrimination, which we still see in droves, are belief, access and representation. Women do not have the same access to education, digital education or digital learning tools. My work has really been around ensuring that women are not given opportunities because they are women but because they are skilled for those roles.
Is there an overall mission that you are looking to achieve or is it on an individual basis?
The CyberGirls Fellowship is now on Africa’s biggest cybersecurity training and mentorship programme and is really successful. We’ve been featured by the World Bank as a model programme that needs scaling. We’ve created a disruptive educational model that affords girls in Africa aged 18 to 28 to study for free, get cybersecurity skills and typically enjoy between 300 per cent to 1,200 per cent increase in their income. So, for me, success just looks like those girls being able to access opportunities. But if I were to zoom out, I’d like in five years from now, what I’m doing becomes no longer useful because we are in a better place in terms of gender equity. The truth is that inclusion isn’t nice to have; it’s an innovation imperative, a business imperative. The more inclusive we are, the better chances we stand to fight the very kind of cyber threat we are facing. If we’re leaving behind half of our population, we are leaving behind half of the chances of solving these challenges. It’s about creating a workforce that is inclusive, that is diverse enough, that’s pulling in all of the skills we can possibly muster in our fight against cybercrime.
Finally, is there a little mantra or something that keeps you going?
Yes, I have a simple rhyme: “Good, better, best, I will never rest, until my good is better, and my better best”. I also often say: “It’s world-class or nothing”. Nothing short of world-class excellence is what I do.
