Here is an overview of the news highlights, activities and and events from July 2016.

• 6 July: Current Board Chair and Vice Chair Reappointed

During the AFRINIC Board Meeting on 6 July 2016, the AFRINIC Board re-appointed Sunday Folayan as Chair and Haitham El-Nakhal as Vice-Chair for a one year term. Find out more about the AFRINIC Board of Directors.

• 21 July: AFRINIC Contributes to IETF Endowment

Leading Internet organisations, including AFRINIC, ARIN and the RIPE NCC, announced in July their combined commitment of more than US$3 million for the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Endowment. The IETF is the Internet’s premiere technical standards body, gathering a large international community of network designers, operators, vendors and researchers concerned with the development and evolution of the Internet technologies and its architecture. The IETF Endowment will provide stable, long-term funding to support the IETF in its mission to make the Internet work better.

Alan Barrett, CEO of AFRINIC, said “Both AFRINIC and our members rely on the open standards created by the IETF, and have an interest in the sustainability of the IETF.  In particular, we would not have any IP addresses to manage if it were not for the IETF.  I am very pleased that we are able to contribute to the IETF Endowment.” Read the full story here.

Training Highlights

Two AFRINIC Training Courses were held in July.

• 25 people attended the AFRINIC IPv6 and INRM Training in Lome, Togo from 26 - 29 July 2016. The courses were held at the ESIBA-IUA (Enseignement Supérieur d’Informatique, de Business et d’Administration). See the course Storify here.
• 20 people attended he AFRINIC IPv6 and INRM Training in Johannesburg, South Africa from 5 - 8 July 2016. The courses were conducted at the COZA House in Midrand. See the course Storify here.

Blog Highlights

In the last few months, we've been steadily increasing the amount and scope of content on the AFRINIC Blog. Here are July's content highlights:

• Baseline Market Study on Domain Names in Africa
  ICANN has initiated a study on the DNS eco-system in Africa and called for participants in their survey.

• Focus on Women in ICT: Uganda
  We talked with Catherine Niwagaba, a Systems Engineer from Uganda, who shared with us how her career path took an unexpected turn a few years ago and her thoughts on women in the ICT sector.

• Spotlight: The African IXP Association (AF-IX)
  Michuki Mwangi, Senior Development Manager for Africa at the Internet Society and CTO of the Kenya Internet Exchange Point (KIXP) talked to us about the recent African IXP Association (AF-IX) Meeting and the key challenges facing IXPs in Africa

If you'd like to publish a guest post on the blog, please take a look at the contribution guidelines and get in touch with us at blog[at]afrinic.net to share your ideas.