As organisations scale, their human-centric security governance appears to weaken, creating significant business risk.
This is one of the findings from KnowBe4’s 2025 Africa Human Risk Management Report.
Other key findings from a continent-wide study of business leaders include:
- Weaker confidence at scale: Leaders at large organisations (501+ employees) report lower confidence in their employees’ ability to respond to incidents compared to smaller companies.
- Regional risk varies dramatically: The attribution of incidents to human error shows a massive variance across Africa, ranging from a median of 11% to 25% in Southern Africa to 51% to 75% in West and Central Africa. A one-size-fits-all approach to risk is failing.
- The measurement gap: The top challenge for leaders is the difficulty in measuring if security training actually works. This problem intensifies at scale, leaving large enterprises investing in training without knowing if it’s effective.