The following are the outputs of the captioning taken during an IGF intervention. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> Ready to start?
Mark, we can go ahead. I'm ready to get going.
>> MARK CARVELL: Yes, go ahead. Please start your presentation. Thanks.
>> KEVIN CHEGE: Greetings. My name is Kevin Chege. I am directing and development. I am joined today for this lightning talk by Dr. Dawit Bekele and Verengai Mabika. Maybe we can start with your introduction.
>> DAWIT BEKELE: Thank you. Very happy to be at this session. I would like to start by saying a few words about the civil society and about the project. So internet society that global organization. Open globally connected secure and trust worthy internet for everyone. It does that with 136 chapters. More than 96,000 individual members and members around the world that share vision and mission.
Works with partners since it believes it's an important goal just with our community. Our works are organized into two broad categories called growing the internet. In two categories, there are 8 projects. One of the projects is measuring which aims at providing critical which helps decision maker make the right decision around this issue. We focused on that. In Africa, internet access improved over the last two decades. There is a measure problem which is reliability. In order to improve reliability, we want to had he been others to get correct information. We are happy we have many partners who joined this effort. With whom we signed as our partner in this project. Happy to have -- and with a partner in this project. This project is true spirit of the multi Stakeholder approach promoted by the idea and I believe that will follow. Kevin will present about the project next week. Thank you.
>> KEVIN CHEGE: Thank you very much, Dawit. Verengai, you can introduce yourself.
>> VERENGAI MABIKA: Thank you, everyone. My name is Verengai Mabika. Policy advisor for Africa. Glad to be joining this session today. Back to you.
>> KEVIN CHEGE: Thank you. I will start with the presentation. As you've heard, we collaborated with AFRINIC which had two main goals. The first one was to determine the levels of internet resilience in African countries. We wanted to do that in a scaleable manner so we can cover all the countries in Africa. We wanted to start measuring metrics and start building on that later on. And want to aggregate all the information on the countries. All the measurement information we felt was important in the country. And the second goal was to present these easy to understand passions. Wanted to present this information as simply as possible. We build what we call the internet resilience index or IRI. Indicator of country's performance. This is a yardstick we can use to compare the experience of the different countries after collecting all those data. Partners her to help us with the thinking approach and methodology help to carry out these measurements and come up with index call. This was AFRINIC. If we go to the web site link, you will see our white paper where we capture our thoughts and approach on how we came up with this index and able to carry out the measurements. So four main categories we felt were important how connectivity in a country was. The first one is infrastructure. The way to think of this is the physical infrastructure behind making internet available. Power provision. So think of these as the tangible infrastructure. And fixed networks and mobile networks. For users in that country. The third one scene abling technologies. We felt it's important to look at adoption of key technologies like routing IG. How well is the routing being done in country?
That has significant impact on how well they done experience is. If ISP is not doing a good job in routing the security, that impacts the resilience. And finally, we looked at the local Eco system as the fourth pillar. And here we consider the market readiness, how competitive is the market. If a market has several service providers, that could be an indicator there's more competition and better internet service for the citizens of the country. More competition is law prices and better quality of service. Aggregated a lot of data from several sources. Just to mention a few. Oookla, and several others you can see on the web site. We broke them down into different weights. Under the four key pillars I mentioned. And local Eco system. And within those dimensions are the different data sources. So we could feed this and come up with a founded score and say this is the evidence of the country. These are the scores they got in the different metrics and these are the weights according to how we've calculated the index. So if you go to the past web site, you'll see data presented there. You can play around with the view there. The highest performing country was South Africa. Several change points and cables, cross border cables. And then the lowest performing was not a lot of infrastructure investment and not a competitive market. We also testing a prototype infrastructure just to see. We wanted to carry out our own measurements and increase the data we have. We did find active measurement in about ten countries just to gain experience with how we can carry out active measurements in the future and add those data sets as part of the calculations into the index. So it went well and happy with the results and looking for partners we can work with to expand that. So up coming plans is we want to build interactive dash board. It is static. Seeking partners to expand the index to other regions. We are working in this to do some work in the Caribbean region. We are working with ATU to develop some documents here briefly as well. And seeking more partners to improve the prototype we've developed. All of this is being documented on our dash board. So like to shift about the work we're doing with ATU starting next year which is to build framework documents around the work on internet resilience. I'll put the links on the chat. And you can reach us on email. Right now, just shift to talking about how this work evolved in the coming months to increase the outreach and also how we intend to work with the framework documents. This year, I'll invite Verengai to speak more on the framework documents.
>> VERENGAI MABIKA: Thank you for that presentation. And certainly, I'll pick mostly on the policy work. That this project is going to address. So the partnerships we mentioned the African telecommunications union. Most importantly the African telecommunications union which is mostly membership organization of regulators and governments are equally interested and very much interested in building resilience of internet in their different countries. And this work is coming as a priority for quite a number of countries. Moving into 2023, as part of this work, going to be policy documents. That we are going to be working on. Already started working with our partner African telecommunications union. So while a number of regulators are really interested in this work, they are seeking guidance on how to develop robust policy framework for measurement and for building resilience of their internet. That will consist of policies at international level. The private players and other non-governmental players that may be providing those services in the country. So the idea of this policy document is that once we have the policy framework. We have a very clear road map on what they can do to build a resilient internet in their countries. Live or living documents that can also adapt to new technologies or future demand for broadband services in different countries. We are forecasting one technical document or framework document on internet resilience in Africa. Again, this document will describe the technical infrastructure that is required to carry out internet resilient measurement and maintain measurement infrastructure in countries. You may remember Kevin mentioning some of the key indicators that we are going to be checking. The infrastructure. So things like the enabling infrastructure mobile connective and things like that. The second thing around performance and this is very important indicator for measuring quality of service and things like that. And the other indicators are enabling technologies and security. So DNS Eco system and the routing security of the network. Again, technical document will be able to label out things need network to be able to measure those things. And lastly, local Eco system. So expectation of the technical document could be used by the regulators as well as all the service providers in the country. What is essentially important in these cases that we want to be able to plan for the availability of quantity Taytive -- quantitative data source is the data. And also improve on the services we are providing to our communities. Quality of service including, of course, speed. This is one key aspect mentioned by a number of our countries. Really is adoption of DNS. So this is what the policy is going to look like. And I would like to say if there are policy makers in this call and interested in this project, please reach out to us or our partners telecommunications union to create a number of policy makers and regulators to make sure you are not left. So we continue building the internet resilience in our region. So let me pause there.
>> KEVIN CHEGE: Thank you very much for that breakdown. On the framework documents we're hoping to conclude in the coming year. And these will be on there on policy and the technical. I'm not seeing any questions on the chat. Mark, I don't know if there are questions on your side.
>> MARK CARVELL: I'm just looking around the room for raised hands. I see one. Please introduce yourself. We have a few minutes. Not long. Keep it short.
>> Yes. My question is about infrastructure required to resilience. The internet society promoted points and all that. Is it a policy to shy away from investments that I'm sure stability resilience and so on. Thank you.
>> Okay. Thank you for your question. I'll start and if you would like to add. In terms of the resilience. They are one of the more critical ones and we have done a lot of work to promote the establishment and where the exchange points are to strengthen them. And this included training of staff and where supporting equipment to facilitate the establishment of exchange points. Our infrastructure to improve resilience. The answer is no. What we are hoping to achieve with the framework documents is to allow those in decision making process to make informed decision on what they need to do to improve resilience. So the information that you'll find if you go to the dash board in some metrics and very low in some metrics. And why we're showing that in that manner is to show the regulators and policy makers and infrastructure providers that these are the areas you need to strengthen. You cannot improve something without measuring it. That's why we've gone to carry out the measurements. Present in easy to understand manner. When you go to the dash board whether you are a policy maker, you'll see a simple to understand graph. Scoring on securities and market readiness. We're hoping that we then allow those who need to make informed decisions this is where we need to improve.
>> MARK CARVELL: Sorry to interrupt. We're running out of time. We have one question in the room. Can we go to that now?
Thanks.
>> Hi. It's Chris here. I noticed Right Atlas is not listed there. One point that come from that is we're aware doesn't have huge coverage in Africa. Wondering if there was a challenge getting infrastructure or more need to really make this work robust and easy or have you found it okay in that sense?
>> KEVIN CHEGE: Yeah. So I didn't get into the details of it. We had look at the good infrastructure. For the measurement infrastructure I mentioned, we're trying to have a device that can allow software. So the main reason we are experimenting with the prototype platform is from our analysis, there are not enough active measurement locations in Africa. It was very challenging to get live information of what's going on in the country. That's why we experimented with the prototype. Our approach is not to reCrete what is there. And we've been in touch with a number of people from ripe. And it is something we want to incorporate as some of the DNS measurements we want to carry out. I'd like to talk to you maybe after this. Mark can share my email with you and we can carry on this conversation.
>> I think we can squeeze in one last question. Please introduce yourself.
>> Hello. Good morning. Fujani. Great presentation. For Shrilanka, huge problem. Also the same problem. Critical infrastructure problem issue. So we conducted many programs for you as a workshop how to become an entrepreneur using internet. Most of time they are facing issue of infrastructure problem. So they can't continue their work this critical problem. Thank you.
>> Not sure what the question is there. If it's how this measurements we have shown to help, we are looking to expand to other regions. Just carried out in Africa. We are doing a pilot for the Caribbean to carry out similar measurements there. And part of the plans for 2023, we want to expand these measurements to globally. So by some point next year could be very possible for you to view this information on the dash board that we have. And it will show the areas of improvement the improvement and action can be taken. Hope I've answered that question. Take my email address if you'd like more information.
>> MARK CARVELL: Okay. I think we have to close the session now. The talk. Thanks to everybody in the room who participated. And thanks for coming early. And contributing with very interesting questions. Back to you, Kevin, to close it formally.
Thank you.
>> KEVIN CHEGE: Thank you, Mark. Thank you to all the attendees. Any final thoughts?
>> VERENGAI MABIKA: Not from me.
>> DAWIT BEKELE: Thank you for all who came to our session. This is a very important project for Africa and we hope you will contribute to it. We are open to any contribution from the private sector. So we look for to work with all of you in the future. Thank you.
>> KEVIN CHEGE: Thank you. Thanks, everyone. Enjoy the rest of the IGF. Back to you.