Africa Cyber Defense Forum

Africa Cyber Defense Forum (ACDF) is a continental platform for public-private cooperation anchored in our passionate pursuit of better and safer technology.

[Africa Cyber Defense Forum @AcdfNetworks]

Africa’s Digital Sovereignty, Built to Connect: Local data centers and sovereign cloud need cyber resilience, shared rules and regional cooperation to protect interests while supporting innovation and AI.

Read Zelalem Mengistu’s article.

#AfricaTech https://t.co/uY0hLevReA

[Africa Cyber Defense Forum @AcdfNetworks]

When a cyber incident happens, teams need to know who to contact, what to share and how to work together.

On Wednesday, 4 November, teams from banks and payment service providers will practise just that at Banking Sector Cyber Drill — Ex Umoja Shield I. This live simulation will run alongside the main Africa Cyber Defense Forum programme, with a focus on spotting an incident, escalating it and coordinating a response across institutions.

Powered by the Central Bank of Kenya’s @CBKKenya Banking Sector Cybersecurity Operations Centre (BS-SOC) and @NC4Kenya, National Computer and Cybercrimes Coordination Committee

📅 Wednesday, 4 November 2026
⏰ 10:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m. EAT
📍 Mövenpick Hotel & Residences Nairobi, Westlands

Looking forward to a day of practical teamwork and learning. Save the date.
#ACDF2026 #UmojaShield #CyberResilience

[Africa Cyber Defense Forum @AcdfNetworks]

Update available: ACDF 2026 in 13 days

Version 7.0 is rolling out in Nairobi in 13 days.

Changelog: sharper speakers, tougher drills, better coffee, zero downtime for your network.

Will you be attending?
https://t.co/rz4jMP6W1q

#ACDF2026

[Africa Cyber Defense Forum @AcdfNetworks]

⛳ Fairways, Firewalls and Lunch

The best conversations at ACDF don’t always happen in the conference hall. On the morning of Friday, 6 November 2026, we close the 7th Africa Cyber Defense Forum at Karen Golf Club with an 18-hole stableford round, where ministers, CISOs, executives and partners turn a week of discussion into the relationships that carry the Nairobi Communiqué forward.

📅 Friday, 6 November 2026
📍 Karen Golf Club, Nairobi
🏌️ 18-hole stableford

A relaxed, senior-level setting to network with Africa’s cyber defense community

Whether you’re a scratch golfer or just here for the company, there’s a place for you on the course.

👉 Register your place: https://t.co/dz8pvtLTNB

#ACDF2026 #AfricaCyberDefenseForum #CyberSovereignty #GolfTournament #Nairobi #CyberSecurity #Networking

[Africa Cyber Defense Forum @AcdfNetworks]

A stronger signal is coming from Nairobi.

We are proud to welcome the @CA_Kenya Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) as a Strategic Partner of the 7th Africa Cyber Defense Forum.

From 2–6 November 2026, #ACDF brings the cyber defense community together in Nairobi, Kenya, to exchange ideas, build connections and shape what comes next.

Join us in welcoming CA. The signal starts here.

#ACDF2026 #CyberDefense #Nairobi #Africa

[Africa Cyber Defense Forum @AcdfNetworks]

Ask any nurse about the first time a system acted strangely on their ward. They’ll remember it. A screen that froze mid-shift. A patient record that didn’t match the patient. A colleague who, with a long queue and no time, pasted notes into a free chatbot “just this once.”

Nobody ran a risk assessment. Nobody filed a ticket. A nurse just had a feeling that something was off, and said so to whoever was standing nearest.
That instinct is one of the most underrated security tools in any hospital. And it’s why we are so happy to tell you that Jennifer N. is joining us at #ACDF2026.

Jennifer is a registered nurse and board-certified informatics nurse who has spent more than 20 years helping hospitals get technology into the hands of people who actually use it. Today she leads Imara Health AI Consulting and serves as President of the Global Nursing AI Alliance™ Africa Chapter.

Her fireside chat is called Who Governs the AI Inside Africa’s Hospitals? It’s a question that sounds simple until you try to answer it. AI is already arriving in our health systems: through vendor contracts, through donor-funded pilots, and through clinicians quietly trying tools on their own. And in many places, no one has yet agreed who’s responsible when something goes wrong.

Jennifer will talk about what it looks like to get that right: deciding who’s accountable before go-live, listening to the nurses who notice first, and building our own capacity to oversee these tools instead of renting it from vendors.

If you work in health, cyber, policy, or anywhere near the places where those worlds meet, I’d love for you to hear her.

📍 ACDF 2026, Mövenpick Hotel & Residences, Westlands, Nairobi
🗓 2–6 November (main plenaries 4–5 November)

🎟 Get your CyBoma Pass: https://t.co/R1QzOEAsdz

Who’s the first person you’d call if something on your ward, or in your hospital, didn’t look right? Tell us in the comments.

#ACDF2026 #CyberSovereignty #HealthcareAI

[Africa Cyber Defense Forum @AcdfNetworks]

Nobody hacked you. The vendor just stopped answering.

Mobile money transfers are stalling, merchant settlement is backing up, a major bank’s card switch is down and your security team finds no attack.

The company that runs the switch has gone quiet, and now they hold the leverage. Do you pay, freeze the rail, go public or call a foreign vendor who no longer feels like a partner?

At #ACDF2026, we’re putting the people who’d face that call in one closed room.

Operation Float Lock is an executive cyber war-game for CEOs, MDs, Board members and regulators from banks, mobile operators, fintechs and payment providers. They sit together, and the crisis escalates in real time.
Nobody fixes the technology. They decide what to do, and they own the outcome.

The question to take away: if your vendor stopped being on your side tomorrow, would your leadership know what to do in the first 90 minutes?

📅 Tuesday 3 November, 15:30 to 18:30
📍 Pride Inn Azure, Westlands, Nairobi
🔒 Invitation-only. Chatham House Rule.

The session closes straight into the Cocktail Reception.

To request an invitation: [email protected]

#ACDF2026 #OperationFloatLock #CyberSovereignty #CyberDefense

[Africa Cyber Defense Forum @AcdfNetworks]

The boardroom AI debate, settled by people who’ve built the guardrails.

Somewhere in your organization, someone is already asking: do we go with the big closed models (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini), or the open ones catching up fast (DeepSeek, Kimi, Nemotron)?

The good news is that at the 7th Africa Cyber Defense Forum, two people who actually build the guardrails will give you a straight answer.

Meet Noureen N. Njoroge @EngineerNoureen and Tahseen Rabbani, the co-founders of Next Puzzle AI.

Noureen has run threat intelligence at Nike, built Cisco’s incident response practice, and been named Cybersecurity Woman of the Year, twice. She also sits on the boards of WiCyS, the Nasdaq Center for Board Excellence and Africa Cyber Defense Forum (ACDF).

Tahseen is a researcher at the University of Chicago whose work has landed at NeurIPS, ICML and ICLR. He’s also helped shape some of the most popular agentic benchmarks out there.

Their session is Open versus Closed Source Agents: Risks and Sovereignty where you can expect a candid look at data privacy, maintainability, cyber threats and what happens when an agent goes rogue.

📅 4 November 2026
📍 Mövenpick Hotel & Residences, Nairobi

🎟️ Grab your CyBoma Pass: https://t.co/R1QzOEAsdz

Tag the colleague who keeps saying “we should just use AI.” 😄

#ACDF2026 #AIGovernance #AIsovereignty #CyberDefense

[Africa Cyber Defense Forum @AcdfNetworks]

Clear your calendar, charge your laptop, prepare your questions and bring your curiosity.

#ACDF2026 is almost here, and Nairobi is about to host conversations on the technologies, policies and partnerships that will shape Africa's cyber future.

Five days. One continental conversation. Plenty of reasons to be in the room.

📅 2–6 November 2026
📍 Nairobi, Kenya
🎟️ Your next move: https://t.co/R1QzOEAsdz

#ACDF2026 #CyberSecurityCommunity #Nairobi

[Africa Cyber Defense Forum @AcdfNetworks]

Every tax payment, every ID check and every mobile transfer rests on the same question: who really controls the systems underneath?

Dr. Charles Fodya lives that question daily. At the Malawi Revenue Authority @MRA_Malawi he leads the modernisation of revenue systems, digital taxpayer services, cybersecurity, cloud, connectivity resilience and the responsible use of AI. Before that, he headed Malawi CERT at MACRA and helped push the country toward a stronger cybersecurity framework.

His foundation is rare: a PhD in Computing and Applied Mathematics (Wits), an MSc in Mathematical Modelling and Scientific Computing (Oxford), and more than two decades across academia, national ICT programmes and World Bank and EU-supported assignments.

At #ACDF2026 he joins a panel discussion on:
The Systems a State cannot Outsource: Securing Sovereign Identity and Payment Rails

Digital identity and payments are the load-bearing walls of the modern state. This panel asks how to secure and govern them as sovereign infrastructure, not products bought off a foreign shelf.

On the panel with:
• Tim Theuri, Executive Head of Cybersecurity, M-PESA Africa
• Joan Mburu CISA CISM, CISO, Airtel Kenya
• Joel Kazoba, Head of Cybersecurity, Vodacom Tanzania

Moderator: Ms. Meriem Slimani, ATU ICT Development Director

📍 7th Africa Cyber Defense Forum, Nairobi, 2–6 Nov 2026
Main plenaries: 4–5 Nov, Mövenpick Hotel & Residences Nairobi

🎟️ Attendee tickets: USD 200 → https://t.co/R1QzOEAsdz

#ACDF2026 #AfricaCyberDefenseForum #DigitalSovereignty #Cybersecurity #DigitalIdentity #PaymentSystems #Malawi #Nairobi

[Africa Cyber Defense Forum @AcdfNetworks]

We're proud to welcome @PwCMauritius as an official Supporting Partner of #ACDF2026.

Nairobi. 2-6 November. Africa's cyber sovereignty, from vision to action.

#ACDF2026 #CyberSovereignty

[Africa Cyber Defense Forum @AcdfNetworks]

Most CSIRTs already get plenty of threat data. The hard part is knowing what to do with it.

On 3 November, at #ACDF2026, we're running a full-day, hands-on MISP workshop with FIRST: Practical MISP for CSIRTs: From Threat Feeds to Actionable Intelligence.

Your facilitator is Lawrence Muchilwa, Africa Regional Liaison at FIRST. You'll spend the day working in MISP on your own laptop, and by the end you'll know how to:

✅ Set up and run a MISP instance
✅ Bring in threat feeds and organise them
✅ Tag and score indicators so you know what to look at first
✅ Link related events together
✅ Share intelligence safely with trusted partners using TLP

If you work in a national or sector CSIRT, you can take all of this straight back to your team.

https://t.co/ogm4QtOsU9

It's hands-on, so seats are limited. Bring your laptop.

#ACDF2026 #MISP #CSIRT #ThreatIntelligence #FIRSTorg

[Africa Cyber Defense Forum @AcdfNetworks]

The #ACDF2026 programme is live.

We begin at PrideInn Azure on 2–3 November with workshops in AI, digital forensics, SOC operations and threat intelligence. Tuesday also brings the Women in Cybersecurity Breakfast, the ACDF Startup Hub opening showcase and an executive war game.

On 4–5 November, the Forum moves to Mövenpick Hotel and Residences Nairobi for the main plenary sessions. The week closes on 6 November with a Nairobi National Park excursion, golf at Karen Golf Club and the awards lunch.

Take a look and plan your week in Nairobi:
https://t.co/Ao7ftluM8U

#ACDF2026 #Nairobi

[Africa Cyber Defense Forum @AcdfNetworks]

The Currency Nobody Audits

Every fintech pitch deck sells the same promise of convenience, speed, inclusion. None of them sell the thing that actually makes people tap confirm on a payment. Trust does that. Quietly, invisibly, and until it cracks, nobody notices it's the whole foundation.

Kendra Garrett is joining the 7th Africa Cyber Defense Forum to talk about what happens after that crack appears.

Her keynote, Trust is the Product: Why Confidence in Digital Finance Decides Africa's Digital Economy, makes the case that Africa's fastest-growing sector isn't mobile money or embedded lending. It's confidence itself, the fragile, compounding asset that decides whether a customer moves their salary onto a platform or keeps it under the mattress.

In the fireside "The Cyber Risk Nobody Wants to Own," Kendra turns from why trust matters to what happens when it breaks. A breach hits a bank. A payments platform goes dark for six hours. Who absorbs that loss? The customer? The institution? The insurer who never priced the risk correctly in the first place? Africa's cyber insurance market is still being built while the incidents it's meant to cover keep happening. Kendra has spent her career inside that gap, underwriting cyber risk at @SAGAgencyLLC Sylvia A. Garrett & Associates Agency, LLC, and she's not interested in comfortable answers.

This is the conversation that sits underneath every other conversation at ACDF this year. Zero trust architecture, sovereign clouds, incident response playbooks: all of it exists to protect something that has no line item on a balance sheet, and everything to lose when it's gone.

📍 7th Africa Cyber Defense Forum
🗓️ 2–6 November 2026 | Nairobi, Kenya
🏨 Mövenpick Hotel & Residences, 4–5 November

🎟️ Secure your CyBoma Pass now at USD 200
https://t.co/R1QzOEAsdz

#ACDF2026 #CyberSovereignty #CyBomaPass #DigitalTrust #CyberInsurance #ShapingTheFutureOfCyberDefense

[Africa Cyber Defense Forum @AcdfNetworks]

In his latest piece for ACDF, Committee of Experts member and Director Consulting Services at Hunter-Mckenzie, Trey Mujakperuo unpacks a risk most teams miss: hosting data in-region doesn't mean you control it. https://t.co/KUZB6LPS88

[Africa Cyber Defense Forum @AcdfNetworks]

Cybercriminals Don't Respect Borders and Neither Does Kevin Kiban's Keynote

A ransomware crew doesn't check visas nor does a phishing syndicate stop at customs and yet too often, our defenses still operate agency by agency, country by country and silo by silo.

We're honored to announce Kevin Kiban, Acting Head of the Africa Cybercrime Operations Desk at INTERPOL's Cybercrime Directorate, as a keynote speaker at ACDF 2026.

Seconded from the Cameroonian Police, Kevin has spent his career turning fragmented national efforts into coordinated continental action where he led cross-border cybercrime operations, driving intelligence-sharing between member states, CERTs, and private sector partners.

Kevin served as Lead Operations Officer for the inaugural editions of two flagship INTERPOL operations: SERENGETI and SENTINEL. These landmark campaigns reshaped how Africa disrupts cybercriminal infrastructure at scale.

His keynote, Breaking Silos for a Collective Cyber Shield in a Digitally Transforming Continent, will challenge delegates to rethink cyber defense not as a national problem with international help, but as a continental problem demanding continental architecture.

🗓️ 2–6 November 2026 | Main plenary sessions: 4–5 November
📍 Mövenpick Hotel & Residences, Nairobi

🎟️ Secure your CyBoma Pass: https://t.co/njS2yuSxlh

#ACDF2026 #CyberSovereignty #ShapingTheFutureOfCyberDefense #CyBomaPass

[Africa Cyber Defense Forum @AcdfNetworks]

The battlefield has changed, no tanks, no borders just code.

When geopolitical tensions spike, cyber threats travel faster than breaking news. The recent Israel-Iran-U.S. conflict showed how quickly digital danger spills across regions and why nations like the UAE invested heavily in cyber readiness.

Now, those hard-won lessons are coming to Nairobi with José Luis Carrera Jr., a governance and internal audit leader with 20+ years building digital resilience across multinational organizations and GCC critical infrastructure.

During an interactive session on Beyond Borders: Data Sovereignty, Digital Resilience, and National Security in an Era of Regional Instability José will break down how African governments, banks, telecoms, and cloud providers can build digital armor that actually works when crisis hits.

Secure your spot at #ACDF2026 https://t.co/njS2yuSxlh

#ACDF2026 #AfricaCyberDefense #CyberSecurity #DataSovereignty #DigitalResilience #Nairobi #CyberDefense #NationalSecurity #AfricaTech #Governance #GCC #CriticalInfrastructure

[Africa Cyber Defense Forum @AcdfNetworks]

Congratulations Dr Martin Koyabe!

For over two decades, Dr. Martin has helped nations across Africa and beyond build the strategies, institutions and skills that keep their digital spaces secure and today, that expertise comes home to Kenya.

Africa Cyber Defense Forum congratulates Dr. Martin, member of our Committee of Experts, on his appointment as the inaugural Non-Executive Chairperson of the Board of Directors of Kenya's National Cybersecurity Agency (NCSA).

We're proud to share that Dr. Koyabe will bring that same expertise to the stage at ACDF 2026, taking place 4–5 November 2026 at the Mövenpick Hotel & Residences, Westlands, Nairobi.

Join us as we mark this new chapter for Kenya's cyber sovereignty. Congratulations, Dr. Koyabe! 🇰🇪

4–5 Nov 2026 • Mövenpick Hotel & Residences, Westlands, Nairobi

https://t.co/R1QzOEAsdz

#ACDF2026 #CyberSovereignty #ShapingTheFutureOfCyberDefense

[Africa Cyber Defense Forum @AcdfNetworks]

Digital identity and payment rails are the tech infrastructure and the load-bearing walls of the modern state.

If these systems crack, any country will feel the tremor. As the lines between telecom, finance and national security blur, there are some pillars of sovereignty a state simply cannot outsource. #ACDF2026 asks how we secure these systems and who holds the keys.

Joan Mburu CISA CISM Chief Information Security Officer at Airtel Kenya, is thrilled to join a critical panel discussion at the 7th Africa Cyber Defense Forum (ACDF) 2026 in Nairobi to unpack this exact challenge: The Systems a State Cannot Outsource: Securing Sovereign Identity and Payment Rails.

Drawing from the frontlines of telecom security at Airtel Kenya, Joan will be sharing insights on how she has fortified the digital trust that millions rely on daily.
📅 See you in Nairobi from 2–6 November 2026.

🔗 https://t.co/njS2yuSxlh

#ACDF2026 #CyberSecurity #DigitalIdentity #FintechSecurity #AirtelKenya #CyberDefense #Kenya