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Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Preparedness in African Financial Services: Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic
Subject area: Management and Commerce · Area of research: Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
Abstract
This review examines the preparedness of African financial institutions for business continuity and disaster recovery, with particular attention to the operational lessons exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. It evaluates how banks, insurers, fintech firms, microfinance institutions, and payment providers responded to systemic disruption and how governance, technology, infrastructure, workforce capability, and regulatory oversight shaped resilience outcomes. The study adopts a structured narrative review approach, synthesising scholarly literature, regulatory perspectives, and pandemic-era evidence published up to 2020 to assess continuity concepts, risk assessment, business impact analysis, recovery prioritisation, digital service delivery, cybersecurity, third-party dependence, and institutional preparedness. The findings indicate that resilience across African financial services remains uneven, reflecting differences in technological maturity, capital strength, infrastructure reliability, governance quality, and access to digital channels. COVID-19 revealed critical vulnerabilities in branch-dependent operations, remote-working arrangements, customer access, power availability, cyber controls, vendor concentration, and recovery testing, while simultaneously accelerating digital banking, cloud adoption, mobile finance, and distributed operations. The review further establishes that effective preparedness requires the integration of business continuity management, disaster recovery, operational resilience, liquidity capacity, cybersecurity, and inclusive service design rather than fragmented compliance-oriented planning. It concludes that future resilience depends on tested, scenario-based frameworks capable of preserving critical services under prolonged and interconnected disruption. Accordingly, financial institutions and regulators should strengthen board-level oversight, recovery testing, digital and energy redundancy, third-party risk governance, workforce readiness, sector-wide stress testing, and cross-border coordination. Future research should prioritise comparable African resilience metrics, cyber recovery, artificial intelligence, cloud concentration, climate-related disruption, and inclusive digital continuity to strengthen evidence-based supervisory and institutional resilience decisions continent-wide.
Keywords
business continuity management; disaster recovery; operational resilience; african financial services; COVID-19 pandemic; digital financial infrastructure
How to cite this paper
@article{1722620,
author = {Samuel Fadero, Demilade Jooda, Serif Oyindamola Oyesiji, Stanley Nwakamma},
title = {Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Preparedness in African Financial Services: Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic},
journal = {Iconic Research And Engineering Journals},
year = {2020},
volume = {3},
number = {9},
pages = {525-544},
issn = {2456-8880},
url = {https://www.irejournals.com/formatedpaper/1722620.pdf},
abstract = {This review examines the preparedness of African financial institutions for business continuity and disaster recovery, with particular attention to the operational lessons exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. It evaluates how banks, insurers, fintech firms, microfinance institutions, and payment providers responded to systemic disruption and how governance, technology, infrastructure, workforce capability, and regulatory oversight shaped resilience outcomes. The study adopts a structured narrative review approach, synthesising scholarly literature, regulatory perspectives, and pandemic-era evidence published up to 2020 to assess continuity concepts, risk assessment, business impact analysis, recovery prioritisation, digital service delivery, cybersecurity, third-party dependence, and institutional preparedness. The findings indicate that resilience across African financial services remains uneven, reflecting differences in technological maturity, capital strength, infrastructure reliability, governance quality, and access to digital channels. COVID-19 revealed critical vulnerabilities in branch-dependent operations, remote-working arrangements, customer access, power availability, cyber controls, vendor concentration, and recovery testing, while simultaneously accelerating digital banking, cloud adoption, mobile finance, and distributed operations. The review further establishes that effective preparedness requires the integration of business continuity management, disaster recovery, operational resilience, liquidity capacity, cybersecurity, and inclusive service design rather than fragmented compliance-oriented planning. It concludes that future resilience depends on tested, scenario-based frameworks capable of preserving critical services under prolonged and interconnected disruption. Accordingly, financial institutions and regulators should strengthen board-level oversight, recovery testing, digital and energy redundancy, third-party risk governance, workforce readiness, sector-wide stress testing, and cross-border coordination. Future research should prioritise comparable African resilience metrics, cyber recovery, artificial intelligence, cloud concentration, climate-related disruption, and inclusive digital continuity to strengthen evidence-based supervisory and institutional resilience decisions continent-wide.},
keywords = {business continuity management; disaster recovery; operational resilience; african financial services; COVID-19 pandemic; digital financial infrastructure},
month = {March},
}