JA Africa launches free CyberSmart course to tackle youth online fraud
Junior Achievement Africa has launched CyberSmart, a free, bilingual digital safety course aimed at young people across sub-Saharan Africa. Released during Cybersecurity Awareness Month in October 2026, the programme is designed to address a rapid rise in mobile money fraud and AI-assisted phishing attacks on the continent.
The release cites INTERPOL's African Cyberthreat Assessment Report 2026, which recorded a more than doubling of reported cybercrime losses across Africa between 2024 and 2025, rising from US$192 million to US$484 million. Identified victims grew from 35,000 to 87,000 over the same period. INTERPOL estimates that cybercrime caused at least US$5 billion in direct economic damage across Africa in 2025, with 55% of reported cases involving AI in some form. Mobile money fraud was identified as the most prevalent online scam type, with 97% of surveyed countries flagging it as a major threat.
CyberSmart is hosted on JA Africa's existing Skills Lab platform, which the organisation says has reached more than 100,000 young people since 2020. The course runs across three short, interactive modules covering topics from protecting mobile money PINs to identifying phishing attempts, and is available in English and French at no cost.
"Every young person deserves the confidence to learn, work, connect, and build their future safely online," said Simi Nwogugu, President and CEO of JA Africa. "By building simple cyber-safe habits today, young people can protect their opportunities tomorrow."
Market context
Africa's cybersecurity gap is structural. Digital financial inclusion has expanded at pace across the continent, with mobile money infrastructure now central to everyday transactions in many markets. However, the regulatory frameworks, national computer emergency response teams (CERTs), and consumer-protection institutions meant to underpin that ecosystem have in many countries lagged behind adoption. The result is a large, digitally active population with limited baseline security literacy and significant exposure to social-engineering attacks.
JA Africa operates in 23 countries across sub-Saharan Africa and reaches more than one million young people annually through partnerships with ministries of education and more than 3,000 schools. Extending into digital safety education fits a broader pattern of development-sector organisations stepping into cybersecurity awareness where formal institutions have limited capacity.
Competitive and regulatory landscape
Continent-wide cybersecurity education initiatives have historically been delivered through government-backed frameworks, such as the African Union's Convention on Cyber Security and Personal Data Protection (the Malabo Convention), and through bilateral technical-assistance programmes from bodies including the ITU. Purely private or non-governmental digital-safety programmes targeted specifically at youth and delivered via smartphone-accessible platforms are comparatively rare at this scale.
JA Africa says it intends to work with ministries of education, technology companies, financial institutions, and telecoms providers to bring CyberSmart into schools and community learning spaces. The explicit call for telecom partners is notable given that mobile operators in many African markets function as de facto financial-services providers and carry direct exposure to mobile money fraud.
The INTERPOL figures cited in the release are attributed to the organisation's African Cyberthreat Assessment Report 2026, which provides a third-party anchor for the headline numbers, though national reporting rates for cybercrime across the continent vary considerably and the aggregate estimates carry inherent uncertainty.