AfriNIC will continue to spearhead Internet technology in Africa
CEO
of AfriNIC Adiel Akplogan shares with SEGUN ORUAME the
challenges of managing Africa’s Internet resource and his focus on
ensuring the readiness of African opeartors for Ipv6.
As CEO of AfriNIC, would you say that African countries whether
through the public and private sectors have sufficiently responded
to make AfriNIC as relevant as it should be?
I will say that a lot of progresses have been made in the region
since AfriNIC was created in 2005 and much of this success is due to
the support we get from the public and private sectors, particularly
as issues related to IP address management increased. The important
challenge that we faced at the beginning was the awareness of
African stakeholders (including technical community) on IP addresses
management issues. That was one of the reasons why we made training
and capacity building an important element of our activity plan for
the past five years. The results are quite encouraging.
What do you hope to achieve with the meetings in Cairo...what are
the set out expectations?
As an important aspect of our commitment to bottom up approach in
Internet Number Resource Management Policy development in the Africa
region, our bi- nnual meetings are mainly focused on public policy
proposal discussions. In Cairo, we will discuss two major policies
that are related to the exhaustion of IPv4 Addresses. One of them is
regarding the way AfriNIC should manage the last IPv4 address block
we will receive from IANA at the end of the central pool. This
policy, called “soft landing,” describes how we should change the
criteria of allocations/assignments of IPv4 while at the same time
encouraging IPv6 deployment and ensuring that new comers have the
necessary IPv4 resources required for them to properly conduct their
transition to IPv6 without interrupting their business operations.
The second major policy, which is meant to be a global policy, is
meant to define how IANA will mange unused and retuned IPv4 address
it received from users indifferent region.
Has Africa made remarkable Internet presence in terms of
Infrastructure and Content?
Well things are changing, and progress is being made. But to be
frank, I will not say that it is “remarkable.” Africa has made
remarkable progress in Mobile technology adoption. That is a fact
and should also be an eye opener for us. Africa has potential and
ICT is an opportunity for us to improve our quality of life.
Infrastructure and content goes hand in hand. You cannot really
improve content creation and its usage if a good infrastructure does
not exist. When I talk about infrastructure, I don’t usually refer
to International connection as such … I refer to local networks and
their interconnection to allow affordable access to end users only
and based on local connection cost and not on International traffic
where we suffer from an unbalanced cost scheme. We need to build our
own networks, consolidate them, and then try to compete on the
global connectivity market … it is the only way we can be considered
and bring in some weight in terms of traffic exchange and cost
negotiations.
Where lies AfriNIC future in terms of growth of Internet in
Africa and in terms of human capacity to manage Internet diffusion?
We will continue to spearhead Internet Technology in the region. We
are now working hard to give ourselves the necessary resources to
efficiently achieve that goal. We will continue to do training and
explore other ways to improve its effectiveness as well as to reach
all the stakeholders (Government and Civil Society are our next
target). Internet appropriation in our region will come from our
capacity to really understand the culture underlying the development
of the Internet (openness and user-driven (bottom-up) technology
approach). We at AfriNIC will continue to support initiatives that
are inline with our vision. The main role lies on enabling the
environment to be created by Policy makers.
What would you regard as your core challenges as CEO and one
conversant with Internet issues as they affect the continent?
My focus now as CEO of AfriNIC is Africa Operators readiness for
IPv6 and more generally our ability to safeguard AfriNIC’s
achievements and continue to help the continent to be present on the
International Internet landscape. Africa is Africa, it is not
Europe, not America or even Asia. We have our own realities, our own
culture, our on challenges, our own way of interpreting things, we
have our own needs and nobody can help us better to achieve
wellbeing than ourselves. This requires commitment, sacrifice and
determination from all of us to succeed.
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