CyberSafe and SANS award AI security fellowships to women cybersecurity professionals ...

CyberSafe Foundation and SANS Institute have launched an AI security fellowship for women in cybersecurity across Africa. The full fellowship is open to women with at least three years of cybersecurity experience, and applicants do not need prior experience in artificial intelligence.

Sixty-three percent of organizations in sub-Saharan Africa report a shortage of the people and skills needed to meet their cybersecurity objectives, according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2026. Expanding access to advanced and affordable training will be important to developing the expertise needed to address this workforce gap.

The CyberSafe x SANS AI Security Fellowship awarded ten fellowships to women working in cybersecurity across Africa, covering a four-course SANS AI security curriculum and two GIAC certifications. Applicants had at least three years of hands-on cybersecurity experience, but no prior AI background was required. The training runs from October 21, 2026 through July 30, 2027.

The Fellowship comes out of an expanded partnership between the organizations. The pilot model was launched in 2025 through CyberGirls+, which sent ten CyberGirls Fellowship alumni from Nigeria, Kenya, and Zimbabwe through SANS training and one GIAC certification. The AI Security Fellowship broadens the program’s reach and targets skills development entirely in AI security to meet industry demand.

CyberSafe Foundation, founded in 2019, runs the CyberGirls Fellowship, a free year-long training, mentorship, and placement program that has reached more than 1,800 women in 27 African countries. The AI Security Fellowship removes the financial barrier at the step, covering the curriculum and certifications, with no cost for fellowship recipients.

The curriculum builds toward one goal: the ability to defend the generative AI systems organizations now run in production and use AI to enhance cybersecurity operations. All four courses are self-paced through SANS OnDemand, and each must be completed before the unlocks.

“We know these women. They have already built real careers in cybersecurity, and this fellowship gives them a specialization the market barely has yet. That is a different level of career entirely,” said Confidence Staveley, Founder and Executive Director, CyberSafe Foundation.

The first two training courses build foundations. SEC411: AI Security Principles and Practices assumes no prior AI background and gives a security practitioner a working understanding of how large language models behave and where they break. SEC495 covers retrieval-augmented generation, the method organizations use to connect an AI model to their own internal records, and how to keep that connection from exposing data it should not.

The other two courses build specialized skills on top of that foundation. SEC545: GenAI and LLM Application Security works through defending a generative AI application end to end, from the data feeding it to the pipelines that put it into production and leads to the GIAC AI Platform Security (GAIPS) certification. SEC598: AI and Security Automation for Red, Blue, and Purple Teams covers using AI to automate both attack simulation and defense and leads to the GIAC AI Security Automation Engineer (GASAE) certification. Both are built on hands-on labs rather than lectures.

Mentors from CyberSafe Foundation support participants through the courses and into certification attempts, using the same structure as the CyberGirls+ pilot.

“CyberSafe has spent years building this talent pipeline, and they know exactly who is ready. What they could not solve on their own was access to advanced, hands-on training. That is the part we, at SANS, are proud to support. We are focusing this second partnership on AI Security because these skills are aligned to industry workforce needs and emerging trends in cybersecurity operations,” said Rushmi Hasha, Director, Mission Programs and Partnerships, SANS Institute.

SANS Institute is supporting the scholarships for this cohort. Organizations interested in funding future cohorts and scaling the effort can register interest here.