Africa's tech community is set to receive training and policy support through a partnership between UniForum SA and regional Internet registry AfriNIC.
As the organisation selected by the African Union earlier this year to run the dotAfrica Top Level Domain (TLD) registry, UniForum SA has partnered with AfriNIC, the regional Internet registry tasked with the allocation of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, to drive training and policy discussions across the continent.
Under the partnership, the dotAfrica project will sponsor four AfriNIC meetings, allowing more people to participate in technical training and policy discussions. The meetings, with public and private sector officials, will incorporate discussions around policy issues that affect Internet growth and accessibility, as well as ways to collaborate on cyber security and how to promote the deployment of new technology, including Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6).
Driving development
AfriNIC offers the technical community training on cyber security, IPv4 exhaustion, IPv6 deployment, IP and mobility, policy and IP address allocation, and Domain Name System Security Extensions, among other topics.
Mohamed Bashir, dotAfrica steering committee chairperson, says the organisation's partnership with AfriNIC is a bid to further its commitment to policy and training development in Africa. “AfriNIC interfaces with the Africa Network Operators Group (AfNOG) and Africa Top Level Domain organisation. This is vital for growth in the policy and technical community.”
AfriNIC CEO Adiel Akplogan says dotAfrica's sponsorship shows that the organisation is committed to supporting Africa's Internet ecosystem in the region. “[It also] supports our mission to promote a multi-stakeholder bottom-up policy process. The community will benefit from this kind of sponsorship by attending and participating in our meetings.”
Michuki Mwangi, CTO at Kenya Internet Exchange Point and a trainer at AfNOG, says the meetings feature discussions and consensus building on regional and global policies related to Internet resource management. “[The partnership between AfriNIC and dotAfrica] will go a long way in enhancing these meetings.”
Mwangi says the partnership also means that those who would previously not have been able to attend meetings in person, will now be able to participate.
As the registry manager for .co.za (SA), UniForum has submitted a bid as the ZA Central Registry. The bids for the new generic TLDs have been submitted to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers and bidders will be revealed next Wednesday.
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