Dr Martin Koyabe
Senior Advisor (GFCE Africa) & Founding Partner (Africa Cyber Expertise)
London, United Kingdom
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Dr Martin Koyabe is an ICT expert, Cybersecurity and AI leader, and emerging technology strategy & policy expert with more than 30 years of international experience spanning digital infrastructure, innovation, research, regulation, legislation, and emerging technologies. He serves as Senior Advisor for Africa at the Global Forum on Cyber Expertise (GFCE), founding partner of Africa Cyber Expertise (ACE), a pan-African consortium of senior cybersecurity and digital governance specialists, and founded DataConnect (Kenya), AI Lab (Kenya) and MWK Consult (UK), which focus on Data Governance, Open Data, AI and other emerging technologies.
He has led major continental initiatives including the Africa Agenda on Cyber Capacity Building with AUDA NEPAD, AI capacity building for 33 African LDCs through the UN Technology Bank and GFCE, cybersecurity resilience programmes for Togo with KPMG and the World Bank, the AU CSIRT CERT project funded by LuxDev, the GFCE AUDA NEPAD Cyber Capacity Building Coordination Committee, and the AU-GFCE Cyber Capacity Building collaboration project supported by the Gates Foundation to strengthen cyber resilience across all 55 African Union member states.
Previously, Martin headed the Technical Support and Consultancy Division at the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation (UK) for seven years, delivering ICT assistance across the Commonwealth. Earlier, he spent ten years at BT as Senior Researcher and Technical Lead, contributing to the 21st Century Network, cybersecurity strategy, Future Internet Architecture research, and a global best practice framework for mitigating DDoS attacks.
He holds a PhD in Communications Engineering, several technology patents, and degrees and executive qualifications from Egerton University, The University of Nairobi, University of Bristol, University of Aberdeen, University of Cambridge Judge Business School, and Harvard Kennedy School.
Area of Expertise
Topics
Sustainable Cyber Capacity Building in Africa — From Dependency to Ownership
Abstract:
Africa's digital transformation is accelerating faster than the cyber resilience needed to protect it. As AU member states roll out digital public infrastructure, expand connectivity, and adopt frontier technologies such as artificial intelligence and, increasingly, quantum computing, the gap between digital ambition and secure, well-resourced cyber capacity is widening. Cyber capacity building (CCB) across the continent remains heavily project-based, donor-dependent, fragmented across initiatives, and vulnerable to funding cycles — undermining the very sustainability it seeks to create.
This session convenes leading continental and international actors — GFCE Africa and the Africa Cyber Expertise (ACE) Consortium, Smart Africa (host of the African Network of Cybersecurity Authorities, ANCA), AUDA-NEPAD, and development partners and donor countries — to move the conversation from delivering capacity building to sustaining it. The dialogue will surface the structural challenges AU member states face, identify concrete opportunities, and examine practical, durable financing models for CCB in an era of AI-driven risk and emerging post-quantum threats. The goal is a set of actionable pathways toward African-owned, sustainably funded cyber capacity building.
Session Objectives
• Provide a shared, evidence-based picture of the sustainability challenge facing CCB in Africa.
• Showcase the complementary CCB efforts of GFCE Africa / the ACE Consortium, Smart Africa / ANCA, AUDA-NEPAD, and development partners, and how they interlock.
• Identify concrete, financeable pathways toward sustainable, African-owned CCB.
• Generate a short set of actionable recommendations to feed into the AfIGF 2026 outcomes/communiqué and into continental cyber processes.
Expected Outcomes & Deliverables:
• A concise set of actionable recommendations on sustainable CCB financing, suitable for inclusion in the AfIGF 2026 communiqué.
• Improved coordination signals among the featured partners, reducing duplication.
• A shared reference framing that member states can use to advocate for domestic CCB budget lines and blended-finance approaches.
• A short post-session summary note for wider dissemination through GFCE Africa, Smart Africa, and AUDA-NEPAD channels.
Relevance to AfIGF 2026:
The session advances the Forum theme of innovation, inclusion, and trust by treating secure, sustainably financed cyber capacity as the foundation of trusted digital transformation. It is action-oriented and multistakeholder by design, connects directly to the AU Digital Transformation Strategy (2020–2030), Agenda 2063, WSIS+20, and the Global Digital Compact, and brings continental delivery bodies into direct dialogue with the member states and donors who fund them.
Enhancing Parliamentary Recording (Hansard) in Africa Through Artificial Intelligence
Abstract:
Hansard — the official verbatim record of parliamentary proceedings — is the backbone of legislative transparency and public accountability across Africa. Yet in many national parliaments and, acutely, in sub-national assemblies, Hansard production is slowed by manual transcription, editorial backlogs, staffing and cost pressures, multilingual proceedings, and uneven publication. The result is delayed, incomplete, or inaccessible records that weaken citizens' ability to follow how they are governed.
Recent developments show a clear opportunity for the use Artificial Intelligence (AI) in enhancing parliamentary session recordings in African states. At the 8th Hansard Association of Kenya (HAK) Conference held in Kisumu, Kenya, 10-16 May 2026, parliamentary (county and national) reporters, clerks, and digital experts examined how Artificial Intelligence — automatic speech recognition, speaker diarisation, machine translation for African languages, and searchable digital archives — can move Hansard from a slow, retrospective document toward a near real-time, discoverable, accurate, transparent and inclusive public record.
The Conference brought together participants from African countries including: Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, Tanzania and Lesotho. The participants confronted the harder questions: accuracy and the legal status of an AI-assisted verbatim record, accountability and human oversight, data sovereignty over sensitive parliamentary data, and the risk of widening the gap between well-resourced national parliaments and under-resourced county, provincial or state assemblies in African countries.
Session Objectives:
(1) Share evidence and lessons from the HAK Conference 2026 and the African countries assemblies experience on the current state of Hansard production and the readiness of AI to support it.
(2) Map the practical challenges African parliaments face — transcription backlogs, cost and staffing, multilingual proceedings, and unequal capacity between national and sub-national assemblies.
(3) Examine the AI toolchain realistically: automatic speech recognition, speaker diarization, African-language support, real-time captioning, and searchable archives — including where the technology is strong and where it still fails.
(4) Address governance head-on: accuracy standards, human-in-the-loop verification, the legal and evidentiary status of an AI-assisted record, data protection, and sovereignty over parliamentary data.
(5) Identify shared, adaptable approaches — standards, procurement, capacity building, and cross-parliamentary cooperation — that smaller and larger legislatures can both use.
(6) Generate interest and build consensus on a roadmap for establishing a Pan African Hansard Forum or Platform to bring together key stakeholders from across African countries.
Expected Outcomes:
• A concise set of shared principles for trustworthy, human-supervised, AI-assisted Hansard suitable for adaptation by African parliaments.
• A practical challenge-and-opportunity map distinguishing national and sub-national needs.
• Identified opportunities for cross-parliamentary cooperation, capacity building, and open African-language speech and translation resources.
• A short session report contributing to the AfIGF 2026 outcomes and the Parliamentary Track's ongoing work, with a view to follow-up at national and regional forums.
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