Nairobi Kenya – DCA calls for support for “.africa” at Kenya IGF

Nairobi, Kenya, 29th July 2010: DCA participated in the 2010 Kenya internet governance forum which was hosted under the theme “advancing the internet governance debate in kenya. More info on Kenya IGF.

Calling for support, Bekele spoke on “.Africa” and the need for people to recognize its benefits and opportunities and not to parallel its treatment and consideration with commercial generic Top Level domains such as .bank or .food, as “.Africa” falls under a “geographic domain” requiring for eg. endorsements from governments.” She also said, “Our model of governance follows the Kenya Network Information Centre KNIC multi-stakeholder model. The technical community needs to raise their concerns and issues openly and transparently based on merits of the project”
Commenting on the role of IGF forum and of ICANN, Mr. Barry Ryan, an advisor to DotConnectAfrica and the CEO of Fintech International, said: “ICANN has emphasized on a strict separation on its governance model for various areas such as registry registrants, DNS, IP versus the IGF forum which seem to take a more generalized approach, which should not be confused with the well focused areas of ICANN” .

Photo by People Magazine:

Ms. Sophia Bekele, Mr. Barry Ryan, Dr. Ndemo Bitange

The conference attracted government representatives, including James Rege, the chair of the Parliamnetary committee on energy, communications and information and Dr Bitange Ndemo, the PS ministry of information and communication. There were also stakeholders in the ICT community in the country. DCA press release link