AfriNIC is a non-governmental and not-for-profit membership based organisation. Its main role is to serve Africa region as Regional Internet Registry, alike the four other continents which have their own RIR.

AfriNIC’s Vision is:

AfriNIC’s Mission is:

AfriNIC’s Core Values are:

The AfriNIC organizational structure is set to encourage a bottom-up self governance management model where policies and other organisational functions are determined by the community in general and members who elect representatives that seat on the Board of Directors. The discussions are conducted via both public meetings and e-mail discussion lists. There are no requirements or pre-requisites for any person or entity to participate. AfriNIC has a General assembly which meets once a year whereas Public Policy Meetings are organised twice a year (one back-to-back with the General Assembly). Learn more about AfriNIC service region

Background

The allocation of the Internet address space is primarily carried out by the IANA (Internet Assigned Name Authority) under a contract with ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). IANA allocates IP address blocks to RIRs (Regional Internet Registries) which have the authority to re-allocate them within their respective geographical areas (of continental scope). Internet Service Providers (or LIRs – Local Internet Registries) and certain other organisations that satisfy the criteria defined in each RIR policy obtain IP address space from the RIR that serves their area. In order to encourage topological address space assignment, other organisations should ordinarily obtain their IP address space from LIRs (their ISP).

The first initiative for establishment of AfriNIC started in 1997 before ICANN, when some of the earlier Internet adopters from Africa (Niii Quaynor – Ghana, Alan Barrett – South Africa, Sana Bellamine – Tunisia and Nashwa Abdel-Baki – Egypt) proposed a document to set up an organisation to manage Number resources in Africa. The idea behind the initiative was to adapt the allocation policies applied by the already established RIRs (RIPE NCC and APNIC) to Africa’s realities. This proposal resulted to a consensus in 2000 with the setup of AfNOG (the African Network Operators group). It was decided that the overall overseeing of AfriNIC will be done by representatives elected from the six identified sub-regions in Africa (Northern, Western, Central, Eastern and Southern). The resulting organisation was registered in Mauritius with its various operations distributed among three other countries as follows:

• Technical Operations in South Africa
• Backup and Disaster Recovery in Egypt
• Training coordination in Ghana.

Until 2004, Number Resources were managed in Africa by the European registry (RIPE NCC), the American Registry (ARIN) and the Asian Registry (APNIC). In April 2005, ICANN recognized AfriNIC as the fifth Regional Internet Registry in the world according to criteria defined in its ICP-2 document (Criteria for establishment of Regional Internet Registries).

Region of Coverage

At present, there are four other RIRs: RIPE-NCC (serving Europe and surrounding areas), APNIC (serving Asia and Pacific region), ARIN (serving North America) and LACNIC(serving Latin America and the Caribbean).

Organisational Structure

last modified : 12/01/10