Crossing t's and dotting coms

We are pleased to announce that the United States Trade and Development Agency (USTDA) has awarded Simon Everett a prime contract to conduct a desk study review of Kenya’s National Cybersecurity Master Plan.

This project is particularly exciting for us, since Kenya is at the leading edge of cyberspace in Africa. Although it has long been a regional finance and technology hub, Kenya’s reputation as an incubator for emerging technologies leaped after the 2007 launch of M-PESA - a platform that is now recognized as a mobile payments pioneer. But in Kenya as elsewhere, the transformative promise of innovative information and communications technologies (ICT) goes hand in hand with cybersecurity risks.

In 2011, USTDA awarded a grant to the Government of Kenya to procure technical assistance with national-level cybersecurity planning. USTDA sponsors projects like this all over the world - in order to both spur economic development and expand the global market for American goods and services. As both a force for growth and a force for good, USTDA represents a salient success story for American foreign policy: the agency indicates that it is now generating $76 of returns for every $1 invested in international programs.

To ensure that its investment in Kenya’s cybersecurity future maps to the objectives of the grant, USTDA has retained Simon Everett to critically review the Master Plan and its associated components. We have developed an analytic framework that enables the technical expertise of our team to be applied in an objective, constructive, and logical fashion. Although this is the final step of this particular grant process, it’s just the beginning of an enhanced cybersecurity posture for Kenya and a new period of opportunity for cutting-edge American cybersecurity firms in East Africa.