Confidence Staveley
Cybersecurity has moved from a technical function to a board-level exposure, but most organisations still talk about it in language only the security team understands. The result is decisions made on incomplete information, regulators losing patience, and digital trust eroding faster than it can be rebuilt. Closing that gap requires translators who can hold technical authority and commercial clarity in the same room.
Confidence Staveley is a cybersecurity leader, author and founder of the CyberSafe Foundation who helps organisations treat cyber risk as a board-level discipline and a workforce question, not a technical afterthought.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Confidence Staveley
- A practitioner voice on cybersecurity rooted in build-side delivery: founder of a foundation that trains thousands of women across 22-plus African countries, not a commentator describing the field from outside it.
- Author of API Security for White Hat Hackers (Packt, 2024), a technical book serious enough to be used inside security teams, written with co-author Christopher Romeo.
- Sits on the World Economic Forum Global Future Council on Cybersecurity, giving boards a direct line to how global policy and operational practice are converging.
- Brings a developing-economy lens most bureau cyber speakers do not: digital trust, payment threat landscapes and capacity-building in markets where the cost of a breach lands differently.
- Operational credibility on the workforce question: her CyberGirls Fellowship has become a model programme cited in the World Bank 2023 practitioner note on closing the cyber skills gap.
Biography highlights
- Founder and Executive Director, CyberSafe Foundation (Nigeria)
- Author, API Security for White Hat Hackers, Packt Publishing
- Member, World Economic Forum Global Future Council on Cybersecurity
- Member, Forbes Technology Council
- 2023 Cybersecurity Woman of the World Award; ISC2 Global Achievement Award
- Obama Foundation Leaders Africa, 2022 cohort
- SANS Institute Difference Maker Award, People’s Champion of the Year, 2024
Biography
Most cybersecurity conversations at the board level still depend on the security team simplifying for everyone else. The translation rarely survives the journey. Confidence Staveley built her career on closing that gap, in technical depth and in commercial clarity.
She is the founder of the CyberSafe Foundation, a Nigerian non-profit that has trained women across more than twenty African countries through its CyberGirls Fellowship. The programme is a working answer to the cyber skills shortage, recognised in a 2023 World Bank practitioner note as a model worth scaling. Alongside the foundation, she co-authored API Security for White Hat Hackers, published by Packt, a working manual for security engineers rather than a thought-leadership book.
Her platform reflects that hybrid of practice and policy. She sits on the World Economic Forum Global Future Council on Cybersecurity, is a member of the Forbes Technology Council, and was selected for the Obama Foundation Leaders Africa cohort in 2022. The recognitions matter because of where they cluster: technical authority, governance, and inclusion of underserved talent into the global cyber workforce.
What organisations book her for is the rare combination of board-credible framing and ground-floor delivery, with a perspective shaped by markets where the cost of digital failure shows up faster. The 2023 Cybersecurity Woman of the World Award placed her against roughly 160 nominees from women-in-cyber networks worldwide; she came out on top. That kind of recognition, from inside the industry rather than from a bureau, is what separates a working practitioner from a circuit speaker.
Key speaking topics
- Cybersecurity as board-level risk
- Digital trust and the payment threat landscape
- API security and application risk
- The cybersecurity workforce gap
- Women and inclusion in cyber
- Cyber capacity-building in emerging markets
- Data protection in the digital economy
Ideal for
- Boards and audit committees treating cyber as a governance question
- CISOs, CIOs and CTOs are briefing executive teams on workforce and risk
- Financial services, fintech and payments leadership confronting fraud and digital trust
- Global organisations with African operations or talent strategy in the region
Audience outcomes
- A clearer board-level vocabulary for cyber risk, separated from technical jargon
- A sharper read on where the cybersecurity workforce gap is widening, and what is actually working to close it
- A practitioner’s view of API and application security risk in commercial terms
- A more honest framing of inclusion in cyber as a talent-supply question, not a values statement