The coalition was founded in December 2022 to bridge the digital divide in Africa. To achieve this ambition, it focuses on universal acceptance. 

The Coalition for Digital Africa announced, Thursday (April 13),  the launch of a new initiative to strengthen Internet infrastructure across the continent. The initiative aims to prepare the websites, applications, and email systems of African higher education institutions to support all domain names and email addresses.

It is supported by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and conducted in collaboration with the Association of African Universities (AAU). In its framework, the Coalition for Digital Africa will educate African higher education institutions on Universal Acceptance (UA), one of the foundations of a multilingual Internet that allows users worldwide to access websites in local languages. 

It will provide training to help the targeted institutions configure their websites, applications, and email systems to make them AU-compliant and integrate AU concepts into their curricula. 

The project is part of a series of initiatives announced by the Coalition for Digital Africa when it was founded, in December 2022, to ensure the safe and stable growth of the Internet in Africa and close the gap between communities and economies. 

The initiative highlights an important step to building more useful and empowering websites and digital apps in Africa: expanding the choice of languages and scripts. 

“This work truly lays the foundation for a more inclusive Internet. [...] By enabling the use of local languages and scripts, users here in Africa and around the world will be able to more readily access important content online – from within the continent and beyond – for academic purposes,” said Professor Olusola Bandele Oyewole, Secretary General of the AAU. 

Let’s note that in Africa, some 1,000 to 2,500 languages are spoken, according to the Education for All Global Monitoring 2005 report published by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).