From Connectivity to Resilience: Cybersecurity Capacity in Africa and an Evidence-Gated Implementation Framework for Liberia

Africa's digital expansion is increasing dependence on systems whose security institutions remain immature. In Liberia, Internet use reached 32% of the population in 2024 and mobile money is economically significant, yet the National Cybersecurity Strategy reports fragmented governance, weak incident-response capacity, and a small cybersecurity workforce. This article asks how a resource-constrained state can turn a national strategy into operating capability without acquiring every control at once. A bounded integrative review of research, regional instruments, technical frameworks, and Liberian policy documents, with a policy-case analysis, identifies five interacting risk conditions: rapid service digitisation, concentrated infrastructure dependencies, credential-centred crime, uneven institutional ownership, and limited absorptive capacity. It proposes the Capacity-Sequenced Cyber Resilience framework for Liberia (CSCR-L), with four evidence-gated stages: mandate and baseline; protect and restore; detect and coordinate; and assure and scale. Stages advance only on observable artefacts and tested performance, not on expenditure or policy publication.