Co-CEP: A co-designed community engagement protocol as a catalyst for cybersecurity research in Africa: The case of northern Namibia

Through technology, the world has become a global village, connecting geographically distant people into virtual neighbors. This presents many opportunities for individuals, businesses, and remote communities. The advantages of this connectivity have been brought to the fore by COVID-19, as technology and the Internet kept the world connected and functioning. However, in Africa, although much has been done on connecting the unconnected, there remains rural underserved communities. Notwithstanding the benefits of technology and the Internet, the cyber-safety and cybersecurity of those communities living on the fringes of society – rural underserved communities – is unknown. Consequently, many researchers, noting the benefits of technology, have embarked on ICT for Development projects (ICT4D). However, community based ICT4D projects have been failing due to myriad of factors. Some such factors are engagement misalignment, cultural faux pas’, communication, power dynamics and community-buy-in of end-products. With the propensity to circumvent the shortcomings indicated above, Participatory Design (PD) processes may be utilized. Co-design extends PD by allowing researchers and participants to be equals in the creation of solutions to problems contrary to traditional research approaches, that abstract researchers from the community within which they work. As an effort to address these challenges, we present a co-designed community engagement protocol (co-CEP) for rural underserved communities in Northern (Oukwanyama), Namibia. This study was qualitative, guided by Ubuntu and Uushiindaism tenets of trust, neighbourliness, respect, familiarity, hospitality, and collective unity as pillars of fostering communication within 4 villages in Oukwanyama, Namibia. The aim was to understand the concepts of how information flows in order to get engagement from community members for cybersecurity research. We held 4 co-design sessions in 4 villages, with each feeding into the next. The presented co-CEP comprises of 13 elements that are key to successful community engagement within community-based technology projects, especially cybersecurity research. The co-CEP is part of a research study on co-designing cybersecurity practices with rural underserved communities.