Portfolio 01
Digital Resilience.
Continuous protection for the organisations that defend rights and hold power to account.
Our view
Security delivered as an event does not hold.
African civil society increasingly operates against adversaries with sophisticated, state-grade capabilities, while its own security is still too often delivered through one-off trainings, assessments and emergency interventions.
Organisations need continuous protection, someone capable of responding when something changes, and the internal capacity to recover when something goes wrong.
Resilience is not an event. It is an operating condition.
Our position
Our thinking
Three positions we hold.
01
Training is necessary, but it is not protection
A workshop can change behaviour temporarily; an adversary may remain persistent for years. Security has to continue after the trainer leaves.
02
Enterprise-grade protection should not need an enterprise budget
Much of the underlying technology already exists in open source. The missing layer is the operational capability that makes those tools usable for civil society organisations without in-house technical expertise.
03
An incident should produce more than remediation
Every compromise is a source of intelligence. Investigations should generate evidence that can inform organisational decisions and, where necessary, stand up before a board, funder, regulator or court.
Our approach
Four lines of work.
From understanding where an organisation stands, to watching its environment, to investigating compromise and closing the gaps it reveals.
Step 01
Understanding organisations’ resilience realities
Through our Resilience Model framework, we analyse where an organisation sits on the resilience maturity index: a way to understand whether an organisation is truly resilient or exposed to state-actor attacks.
Step 02
Managed security operations
Zeroth Cloud is our security operations platform for civil society: built on open-source technologies, with automated response and human analyst escalation. It provides continuous monitoring across partner environments rather than episodic security support.
Step 03
Incident response and forensic investigation
We investigate compromise, insider threats and data exposure using structured response processes, documented evidence handling and forensic methods designed to preserve the integrity and usefulness of findings.
Step 04
Organisational hardening
We translate what investigations reveal into durable improvements across accounts, devices, access controls, data flows and organisational practices, based on each organisation’s actual threat model.
Partnered with
- West Africa Civil Society Institute (WACSI)
- The Hague Institute for Innovation of Law (HiiL)
- Nigeria Media Innovation Program (NAMIP) Media Development Investment Fund
- DefendDefenders
- Digital Society of Africa (DSA)
- Open Technology Fund Funder
- TechSoup