With 39 African countries including Kenya strongly supporting ZACR to run the dotafrica Top Level Domain (TLD) through their letters to ICANN, the generic top level domain (gTLD) is viewed to have the potential to expand the visibility and identity of businesses in Africa.
Speaking today in Nairobi during the dotAfrica media briefing, Neil Dundas CEO UniIFORUM said they were one of the applicants out of the 1900 but are sure that ICANN will grant the continent dotAfrica.
“We have been running the .ZA for 17 years and we have the capacity to do so,” Dundas said.
According to Dundas, dotAfrica will not only give Africa an identity but it will also open up opportunities for business.
“We will give first priority to African trademarks, this means our firms have to compete globally and this is what we want to stand. A strong brand for Africa in the business sense,” he added.
The dotAfrica domain name is hence expected to give African businesses a continent-wide coverage and identity from the rest of the world. This will even make the firms more accessible by their clients on the continent. Africa has some 140 million Internet users.
Koffi Djossou in a statement says, ZACR will work with tech experts in the region to provide training opportunities for emerging technologies such as Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) and find ways to build new business models that can suit the region.
“If a company can trace its online presence to .africa, then it shows the Pan African nature of the business, this will help the upcoming entrepreneurs with regional ambitions,” Djossou said.
Though any domain name registry could apply to run dotAfrica, only UniForum SA, trading as the ZA Central Registry (ZACR), was selected by the African Union (AU) as the continent’s official bidding Registry Operator.
Non-profit ZACR has over 17 years’ experience administering .co.za. It submitted its bid to administer the dotAfrica TLD to the ICANN in April 2012 after consultations with the AUC and the African domain name community. The nonprofit also got the backing of African government ministers during the Innovation Africa Digital (IAD) Summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia early this year.
The SteerCom has been established to provide moral and ethical oversight and leadership over the .africa project. Members of the SteerCom who represent various stakeholder groups in Africa, including ccTLDs, registrars, governments and the technical community have been engaged under Terms of Reference and a mandate to ensure that the .africa Foundation is established and is functional at the time that .africa is delegated.
ZACR is planning to offer opportunities to innovative entrepreneurs in Kenya and around Africa unique business models to scale their businesses through .africa.
The dotAfrica will foster growth not only in countries like like Nigeria,Ghana ,South Africa,Egypt and Kenya but will also flow to countries like Togo, Malawi and newly independent South Sudan.
Kenya has three members on the TLD steering committee including Alice Munyua ,Project Coordinator for Catalysing Access to ICTs (CATIA), Lucky Waindi Legal Officer, Communications Commission of Kenya, and Barrack Otieno an Administrative Manager of Africa top Level Domains Organisation.
At today’s event, Munyua said Kenyan business now have the chance to go continental as the domain name enlarges there scope.
“A Kenyan firm like KCB can now have KCB.Africa instead of its ccTLDs in every country it moves to,” she said.
The Steercom will focus on development of African ccTLDs like .Kenya, .Uganda. It will also expand the African registrar market as well as bolster the development of local and regional content.
According Kenya’s communications regulator the CCK, Kenya has nearly 30 million mobile subscribers and nearly 6.5 million internet subscribers. The country’s Internet uptake is at more than 5.5 percent putting the country as one of the fastest growing ICT markets in Africa. ICT and mobile sectors in the Kenyan market have outperformed all other segments in the economy, growing on average by over 20 percent annually over the last 10 years, according to the East Africa ICT Report, 2012.
ICANN is currently processing over five hundred applications for different TLDs. This means a decision on dotAfrica is unlikely until the first quarter of 2013.
