Presentations | Registration and Information | Background | The AfIGF | The 5th African Internet Governance Forum (AfIGF)
The Internet Governance Forum
The Internet Governance Forum (IGF) is a platform for multi-stakeholder policy dialogue on prevailing and emerging issues on Internet governance ecosystem. The IGF mandate was extended for ten years by the United Nations General Assembly on 16 December 2015. IGF aims at fostering the sustainability, robustness, security, stability and the development of the Internet, thus facilitating content development and access to information and knowledge. Africa’s contribution to the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) process has led to the formation of the African Internet Governance Forum (AfIGF) in September 2011.
The African Internet Governance Forum
Presently, there are regional Internet Governance Forum initiatives in all the five regions of Africa. In order to bring together the national IGF initiatives together with the regional ones and to promote IG related issues on the continent, there was a strong need for the establishment of an African Internet Governance Forum (AfIGF). Accordingly, AfIGF was convened by the sub-regional IGFs in cooperation with the African Union Commission (AUC) and the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) at the 6th IGF in Nairobi, Kenya. The AfIGF was formally launched on 30 September 2011.
The AfIGF events
Following a bid floated by the AfIGF secretariat, which was based at ECA up to 2014, the various AfIGF sessions were successfully held in:
• Egypt, from 2 - 4 October 2012;
• Kenya, from 24 - 26 September 2013;
• Nigeria, from 10-12 July 2014; and
• Ethiopia, from 6-8 September 2015.
The 5th AfIGF is expected to be held roughly between mid-June and end of August 2016, in a member State. It is worth noting that AfIGF is usually held at least one month prior to the global IGF. Therefore the exact date of the fifth AfIGF will be determined taking into consideration the date of the global IGF, which will be held in Mexico.
Given a number of countries showing interest in hosting the fifth AfIGF, the secretariat would like to facilitate the selection of the host country for the fifth AfIGF and invite countries to submit expressions of interest to the AfIGF Secretariat according to the guidelines given below.