Africans at the IETF Meeting

Background

This week the mobile industry will meet at their annual gathering in Barcelona and I am excited to be there. Mobile has changed my life as it has changed that of the 63% of the world population. For the last two decades, I and billions of people around the world have been able to be reached by others and to reach others almost anytime and anywhere. This was unimaginable just three decades ago.

Mobile has also become the method of choice to access the Internet. In fact, very often it is the only method to access the Internet. Without mobile technology, it would have been impossible to reach internet access rates close to 30% in Africa within just a few years.

Date: 26-28 July 2017

Location: Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

Venue: TBC

What is the Africa DNS Forum?

The Africa Domain Name System Forum is an annual open event for stakeholders in the Domain Name Industry in Africa organized by Africa Top Level Domains Organization (AfTLD), the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the Internet Society. The objective of the three-day event is to help the African domain name industry in Africa to grow at a competitive rate and ensure that the continent is on par with the rest of the world.

Who should attend?

Community established networks are emerging and evolving in Africa as a sustainable solution to address the existing connectivity gaps. 37 community networks initiatives have so far been identified in 12 African countries, of which 25 are considered active trying to set up or improve their own telecommunications infrastructure to connect the unconnected.

One of the goals of the Internet Society is to help expand connectivity and promote increased collaboration between community network operators in the region as well as provide an opportunity for them to engage with other stakeholders.