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The territorial waters of most Africa states are vulnerable because sovereign control is seldom fully exercised due to inadequate maritime domain awareness and response capacity. The magnitude of the threats will increase unless African governments enhance their security capacity.
A growing number of Africa’s security challenges—narcotics trafficking, piracy, illegal fishing, and armed robberies, among others—take place at sea. Illicit actors exploit Africa’s maritime space given its expansiveness and the limited number of vessels African governments can field to interdict this activity. Technology can dramatically improve Africa’s maritime security coverage. However, to do so will require engaging Africa’s scientists who can guide and sustain these efforts. This will yield not only security but environmental and meteorological benefits for the continent.
African states’ maritime security structures are often misaligned with the challenges posed and need coast guard capabilities and an array of intra-governmental partnerships.
Click here for past Africa Center programming on the topic of Regional Responses to Maritime Security.
Maritime access gives Africa a major strategic advantage. Yet none of its 38 coastal states can fully claim sovereignty over territorial waters.
The U.S. government has supported a number of productive lines of effort over the past few years strengthening individual functional areas within the African partners’ maritime sectors. A next critical step is to bring those various threads together to help reinforce an integrated and holistic African response spanning from the maritime incident at sea to... Continue Reading
Missile and armed drone strikes by Houthi militias and hijackings by Somali pirates have destabilized maritime shipping from the Red Sea to the Western Indian Ocean, impacting security and trade for all of Africa.
This three-week, in-person seminar is designed to facilitate participants’ engagement in interdisciplinary peer learning about strategic and adaptive leadership and its implications for the effective management of African security challenges.
Ghana’s inclusive approach to developing a national cybersecurity strategy offers a model for how to rapidly build cyber capacity without undermining the safety of citizens.
This Africa Center program explores the changing demographic, economic, and environmental factors that may pose security challenges now or in the near future.
A two-week program held in June 2022 for mid-level African security sector professionals who are emerging leaders within their fields. With an emphasis on peer-to-peer exchanges, this seminar embodies the Africa Center’s mission to advance African security by expanding understanding, providing a trusted platform for dialogue, building enduring partnerships, and catalyzing strategic solutions.
This webinar addresses the strategic interests that African security sector leaders have to make rule of law part of their plans, projects, and day-to-day work, both within security sector institutions and vis-à-vis the populations they serve. It discusses several core elements of rule of law to clarify what it is in principle and as a process. It examines how integrating rule of law into efforts to counter security threats—whether from violent extremism, conflict, and transnational organized crime, and across land, maritime, and cyber domains—can enhance the security sector’s effectiveness in the long run.