The Quiet Harvest: Corporate Espionage Targeting Foreign Businesses in Africa and the Intelligence Gap That Enables It
About the author: Nijat Babazade Threat Intelligence analyst Institution: FH BFI Vienna . Most foreign businesses operating in Africa carry a mental map of the risks they face. Armed conflict in unstable zones. Regulatory unpredictability. Fraud at the transactional level. What rarely appears on that map is the more deliberate, structured threat: the systematic targeting of their people, their data, and their competitive intelligence by actors with the patience and capability to wait months before taking anything of value. Corporate espionage against foreign firms in Africa is not a marginal phenomenon. It is a growth sector, and the gap between how most corporate security functions are configured and what the actual threat environment demands has never been wider. This article examines who is running these operations, how they work in practice, what the early indicators look like, and what a protective intelligence function needs to do differently. It tries to do so wi...
