The IRM has announced a partnership with East Africa-based Serianu Ltd to develop a localised cyber risk management framework, which aims to increase the number of competent risk professionals as well as enhance excellence in cyber risk management and reporting in the region, which currently faces a huge deficit of qualified risk managers.

According to Dorothy Maseke, chairperson of the IRM EA Regional Group, Kenya especially needs 1,000 qualified risk management professionals annually.

“Risk management is relatively new field of professional practice yet locally and globally, there is a major shift by regulators to entrench high risk management standards and which has now become a core reporting requirement by management as well as a key responsibility of the board of directors. For instance, Kenya’s public sector is guided by the Mwongozo Corporate Governance Code which sets out compliance parameters,” she said,

She added that risk management had emerged as a new specialty career, as a result of changing business and public sector operating environments that have shone a spotlight on their governance mechanisms. At the same time, the practice is increasingly credited with identifying great opportunities for innovation even as it seeks out issues that would derail any organisation from achieving its goals at any one time. Threats and opportunities have been a standard in every organisation’s overall strategy for several decades, but now for the first time in corporate governance history, this is now firmly set in the risk manager’s scope of work and are monitored daily. Maseke noted that this way, organisations are also able to clearly assess and derive benefits of investing in their systems and processes.

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