Yaovi Atohoun
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| Region: | Africa | ||
| Country: | Ghana | ||
| LinkedIn: |  Yaovi Atohoun
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Yaovi Atohoun is currently the Director of Stakeholder Engagement and Operations at ICANN, for the Africa region.[1] He is also a Senior IT Officer at the Association of African Universities based in Accra, Ghana.[2] He was born in 1964 in Togo, and attended an electrical engineering school from 1985 to 1990.
Yaovi Atohoun has more than 18 years of work experience in Information and Communication Technology; he has participated in many workshops on internet technology, wireless technology, and policy. [3] As a consultant he has also worked for many projects involving the use of Information and Communication Technology, these projects include: the Democratic Decentralization Dialogue project, the African Juridical Network, the Central Region Network in Ghana, and the African Executive Network with RTI. He worked twice as an advisory committee member for a project on e-Governance for the CDT.
Yaovi Atohoun is one of the founders of ISOC's Benin chapter. He attended the first AfriNIC meeting in Cotonou, and has also participated in AfriNIC meetings in Maputo, Nairobi, and Abuja, and has served many times as the Chair of its Election Committee.[4]
Mr. Atohoun was the AFRALO representative on ICANN's 2011 NomCom.[5]
Career History[edit | edit source]
Yaovi Atohoun's professional career started in Lome, Togo where he set up and managed the local area network in the National News Agency from 1991 to 1992. From 1992 to 1997, he traveled to more than 12 countries in West Africa for the West African News Agency Development project (WANAD/UNESCO), to computerize the National News Agencies. During the same period he conducted many training sessions on how to use computers, communication devices and the Internet in Benin and other African countries.
Yaovi Atohoun was the USAID/Leland Initiative Coordinator in Benin where he worked with RTI and Computer-Frontiers from 1997 to 2004.
He also worked with the AEDCommunity Learning Centre Project in Ghana, and the ADEA/EDDI education connectivity project. He traveled to Chad, Rwanda and many West African countries to conduct training sessions, technical equipment installation and policy discussions related to Information Technology for the Leland Initiative. He is part of a team that assisted ECOWAS countries in setting up the West African Telecommunication Regulators Association.
In May 2004, he was in the Mano River Union countries (Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone), for an assessment on ICT development among the NGOs working on conflict prevention and mitigation.
Yaovi Atohoun worked as part of a team for the official recognition of the local ISOC chapter of the Benin Republic in 1999. He was the secretary general of ISOC-Benin from 1999 to July 2009, and is currently a member of the board. He participated in ISCOC's INET in Geneva (1998), San Jose (1999), Yokohama (2000) and Sweden (2001). In 2002, Yaovi Atohoun was part of the African delegates in the ISOC-Francophone meeting in Canada.
In November 2007, he was at the IGF in Rio de Janeiro as one of the African ISOC ambassadors.
Fun Fact[edit | edit source]
Yaovi Atohoun has been a choirmaster and brass band teacher for many years.