ICANN’s President, Fadi Chehadé, has announced that ICANN has plans to take a stronger position in Africa by creating six new ICANN representatives from the region. We have a large number of resellers from the African region and feel that this is great news for ICANN and the domain name industry as a whole.
There was criticism of the New gTLD programme that it did not do enough to include African or Latin American Applicants. Fadi Chehadé is keen to improve the ICANN integration in these regions and the first step is creating new representatives.
He was speaking at the Africa Multi-stakeholder Internet Governance meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. He said:
'We will have ICANN staff, at least one, in each of the 6 regions of Africa. North, South, East, West, Central and the Indian Ocean, I want African on-ramps into the ICANN structures. I will give you the on-ramps, but you need to climb them.'
The event was attended by around two hundred people. Among the attendees were important Ministers and government representatives, African business leaders and the two existing ICANN structures in Africa, AFTLD and AFRALO.
Chehadé also said that he would like to see the number of African registrars increase dramatically in the near future. At present, only 5 registrars based in Africa are ICANN accredited. This is a clear indicator of the present lack of ICANN presence in the continent.
Also on the agenda at the meeting was the ‘implementation of an African Strategy for better engagement in Africa’. This is a plan laid out by ICANN representatives from Africa last summer. It was then publicised at the Toronto meeting in October. The strategy mini site states:
'Develop a strategic plan for ICANN’s activities in Africa addressing the needs for presence in African, African participation and representation in ICANN'
The strategy reaches all areas of the African population, from governments, to small businesses, to industry leaders and academics.
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