The Day started with the opening speech by the  AFRINIC Chair Mr Subramanian Moonesamy who highlighted the key role that AFRINIC plays in the socio-economic growth of Africa and its digital transformation.

Africa Internet CEO Roundtable

The Africa Internet CEO Roundtable gathered prominent actors of the Internet industry in Africa to discuss building the digital future of Africa. The roundtable addressed the various perspectives and priorities towards healthy digital growth in Africa through several initiatives in the African region. Each panellist shared their vision of the Digital Economy of Africa and emphasised the need to have the youth and governments engaged.

The Roundtable was moderated by the AFRINIC CEO Mr Eddy Kayihura. The panel for this roundtable was composed of Ms Funke Opeke, Mr Kabir Ruhee and Mr Andile Ngcaba.

Technical Presentations

The Day continued with a series of insightful presentations on Internet-related issues on cybersecurity, Internet Measurement, Artificial Intelligence, connectivity and resilience.

Mr Stephen Honlue gave a presentation on MANRS for Network operators. MANRS for Mutually Agreed Norms is an initiative of the Internet society to help secure the Internet by listing a set of actions, namely Filtering, Anti-spoofing, Coordination and Global Validation. The problems to address include BGP hijacking, Route leaks and spoofing, Mr Honlue also presented the solution that we are advocating for.

The MANRS program invites more organisations to participate precisely in activating more RPKI on their networks and that AFRINIC is always available for support if need be.

Jean Robert Hountomey gave an insight into CVE which is a community-based effort and relies on the community to discover cybersecurity vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities once discovered are assigned a CVE ID, and published to the CVE list.

Mr Brian Davenport from Team Cymru explained a community service project Unwanted Traffic Removal Service (UTRS) where network operators help other network operators mitigate DDoS attacks. Team Cymru who is the steward and service provider of this service works towards building a global collection of network operators that will honour other network operators' requests to black hole attack traffic.

Mr Davenport then covered the NimbusTM project which allows Service Providers, MSPs, and CSIRT teams to take advantage of Team Cymru’s reputation feeds. NimbusTM correlates flow data with IP Reputation data and prepares dashboards/reports via a Kibana interface.

Ms Brume Love’s presentation discussed how Artificial Intelligence can help detect Network Intrusion Systems, even better than traditional Intrusion Systems.

Dr Amreesh Phokeerl presented the MIRA (Measuring Internet Resilience in Africa) project. The talk showed the Internet Society Internet Resilience Index which will be used to evaluate the ability of a network and aggregate a country to provide stable and reliable means of connectivity to the Internet. As such the metrics and the methodology adopted to calculate an Internet Resilience Index. Some preliminary analyses of throughput in countries where the MIRA pods or measurement devices were deployed were presented.

Mr Barrack Otieno from the AFTLD explained that AFTLD in partnership with AFRINIC and the support of ISOC and ICANN are building the African ccTLD Observatory. The Observatory will leverage the Africa DNS Support Program initiated by AFRINIC through which free secondary DNS Services are offered to African ccTLDs to improve the robustness of the DNS.

Mr Fregani Tambeayuk provided an overview of the connectivity challenge in SSA. He discussed how Facebook is investing and partnering to roll out high-speed connectivity across SSA.

Finally, Mr Fargani Tambeayuk highlighted some of the policy and regulatory blockers to collectively address to ensure the widespread availability and usage of high-speed connectivity across the continent.

All the slides are available at: https://meeting.afrinic.net/afrinic-34/agenda

The video recording can be viewed at:

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uTmLnPNmIQ (English)
2. https://youtu.be/5fRQRCJDSPg (French)
3. https://youtu.be/J_90v07pL3U (Arabic)