At-Large Workspace: Draft ICANN Africa Strategic Plan 2016-2020 Version 3.0
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Comments
I would like to commend those who contributed to this wonderful draft and the webinar on it 2 weeks ago which explained more details about the African strategy.
I would like to add that we also need to place an emphasis on the need to have better participation in the workings of ICANN in Africa. This is essential because we need a louder voice and hold leadership positions in ICANN. Africans in leadership positions within ICANN would help especially with participation from Africa. We also need to have a strategy on how to support past and current fellows on better participation before during and after the fellowship to improve participation in the SOs. there should be better ways of putting fellows in touch with each other and form a community where leaders can subsequently emerge in other to strengthen the multistakeholder structure of ICANN.
Secondly, we need to have a strategy to engage government in Africa. As we all know the government system in Africa is significantly different from other parts of the world and we need to acknowledge this. The reality is that Governments in Africa have absolute power (we might not agree with this but this is the truth) and without government pushing for better use of out top-level domains things might not change. If there is a better push from the government, the awareness and use might be better. We still find government agencies in Africa using public domain names to transact government activities
Lastly, we also need to include strategies on how to have ICANN materials translated into our local languages and also the domain names
Comment from Esther Patricia Akello
(She has requested me to post on her behalf as she has no login details yet)
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Hello everyone,
1st special thanks for the well written strategy. I commend the team that put together this draft.
My suggestions:
In regards to challenges mentioned. I would like to suggest that a road map on proposed measures to addressing the challenges be added as it will help with progress tracking for the region , this can be done for the planned action items highlighted in the strategy. This can be added as an addendum too.
Then on the issue of outreach - my suggestion is that the regional office have a database of past fellows and nextgen from Africa with a set of outreach activities for the fellows to execute . The fellowship community comprises of diverse participants from across Africa and a drive to have fellows reach out to the communities they represent can be initiated with the support of the regional office. Periodic calls to all fellows in the region can be made as follow up. But 1st the database of all regional fellows then a follow up of their activities and support them where necessary.
Good comments and suggestions. As we know the african continent is connected and not connected as well. I would also like to propose some additional views on strategy:
We need to be able to see how best to create a better outreach to the continent at large - Suggestion based on E-Learning and Offline document contents to ensure more and more areas are covered
Other is ensuring African participation in comments and also participating widely on policy - Using the same platform of e-learning and offline learning ensure that some representations over the continent get some understanding on policy and to work through.
Work with the Af* organisations to cover as much as possible the underserved countries and encourage participation and developing delivery methods of learning on DNS, Policy etc.,
Work with Afrinic as well to ensure some delivery of training with the Trainers of Afrinic that could also cut down on costs and still achieve some level of further visibility
Afrinic also has a Government working group as well, use that platform with Afrinic and make ICANN presence visible and also help in bringing governments together at the same time to use the same platform together as it will eventually help in the IPv6 and further participation.