Katim Touray

Country:	Gambia
Facebook:	[Katim-Touray Katim Touray]
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Featured in the ICANN 41 - Singapore playing card deck Formerly a member of the ICANN Board

Katim S. Touray works as an independent international development consultant.

He was selected by the Nominating Committee to serve on the ICANN Board from 2008 until 2011. He is the co-founder of Ummah Digital Limited, the applicant for the .ummah New gTLD.

Following ICANN's August 2012 announcement that it would be creating an initiative to strengthen the organization's presence in Africa, Katim wrote on CircleID about the necessity of this initiative, encouraging African stakeholders to get involved with the process. He points out that Africa accounts for only 5 of 1,019 ICANN-accredited registrars, 0 out of 22 gTLD registries, and its ccTLDs are relatively few domains registered. He argues that despite these setbacks, Africa is on the cusp of a major technological growth, with the fastest growing mobile market in the world. Although most subscriptions are for voice services, data service subscriptions are steadily increasing, and there has been explosive growth in financial services like mobile banking and money transfer. He also recalls the trouble that he had convincing ICANN to become involved in regional Internet governance forums and the African Union Heads of State and Government summits, both of which he encouraged, and that the Internet Society (ISOC), AfriNIC, and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) have had a stronger presence in Africa than ICANN, and have been more active in helping build the Internet's capacity on the continent.

Career History

Touray has been a researcher for the Ministry of Agriculture in The Gambia, and served as Chairman of the National Agricultural Development Agency (NADA).

He also served on the Board of Directors of a public access cable TV channel in the US. He played a significant role in the establishment of CPAG. Touray has been an Internet user since the early 1990's, and an advocate for leveraging ICTs for development. He is also a free and open source software enthusiast, and serves on the Council of the Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA).

Education

He holds a B.Agric (University of Nigeria), an MS (Montana State University), and PhD (University of Wisconsin-Madison) in Soil Science.

Publications

Touray has written several articles about the Internet and ICT.