Enhancing Engagement in ICANN in East Africa

It is my pleasure to present to you a summary of ICANNWiki’s program to enhance local content and engagement in East Africa.

As you know, after ICANN 55 in Marrakech, a number of stakeholders from ICANN’s Fellow and NextGen programs expressed a desire to replicate the Edit-a-thon in their home countries. Specifically, Bonface Witaba (ICANN Fellow, Kenya), Oyewole Oginni (NextGen, Cameroon) and Matogoro Jabhera (NextGen, Tanzania) approached our team to build home-grown events that would incorporate local ICTs as well as ICANN with an aim to broaden awareness of relevant topics within the Internet governance space.

Much like the ICANNWiki Edit-a-thon itself, the events unfolded in a granular fashion. Two small events were held in Nairobi, Kenya, where Bonface Witaba explained the project and its goals. These two events had relatively small participation, but set the stage for our event at the University of Dodoma which had a fantastic turn-out. To understand the success of the event, let’s look at the numbers:

Number of Participants: 40

Number of Active Editors: 22

Number of Articles Translated to Swahili: 145

Number of New Articles Created: 138