DCA's pioneership and impact in the Internet and tech space 

Today, I want to recall DCA's successful leadership and achievements in the tech space in the past decade. This included pioneering and championing the '.africa' internet domain name for the African continent.  We did this by extensive travel throughout the African continent, creating and successfully running one of the most popular and visible global awareness campaigns in the global DNS industry, namely the 'Yes2dotAfrica campaign' , and innovative use of technology through creating the first ever multi-lingual social media infrastructure, engaging both online and traditional media platforms. Our campaign efforts at the time earned the Pan-African domain one of the "top 50 most popular domain names "  by global industry experts. This rating, from among the 1930 globally applied for names at the domain authority, ICANN.   

 

What did not kill us made us stronger - our precedence continued 

Undeterred by any challenges and the direct setbacks we faced from not having the expected financial gains to support the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs we envisioned from the .africa project, we forged to give birth and successfully launch yet another pioneering Pan-African African Women-In-Tech program, Miss.Africa. We have now been able to scale to over nine Countries throughout Africa and watched many others follow our footstep, which makes us proud. The challenges we faced also helped us to take our voices in the public domain with an unprecedented, yet effective "NO campaigns", which became a platform to help educate the African and global public to the little known principles of Internet Governance (IG) that earned us a reference of pioneering the IG space . Since then, we have vigorously championed early on, the causes of the gender divide, women-in-tech and entrepreneurship, topics that generated high interest and now become mainstream topics.  We certainly were part of the global conversation as we were invited to present our work and thoughts in these areas in international fora. In a nutshell, we were there. Our presence was felt in creating, innovating, inspiring and impacting the lives of many in Africa and across the world. We are proud of our achievements!

 

Therefore imagine the impact an "Individual" can make. Contrary to the " traditional" African proverb   saying, i t does not always "require a village to raise a child". Each and everyone of us can get up and make 'individual' impact.

     

While we have seen many initiatives in Africa driven by opportunistic endeavors, my passion for pioneering, advocating and leading  such campaigns comes directly from my own early education and professional training in technology, and my experience over a decade of assisting Africa bridge the digital divide. Of course as an early adopter of technology and being a women, I was able to easily recognize the gap that existed in the tech gender divide. As such,  2019 will be a year to consolidate out gains in all areas at DCA, while we push the envelope for some opportunities in the innovative service delivery space. 

 

Approaching 2020; A new way of thinking - impact vs high productivity

Moving forward in 2019 and also approaching the turn of the decade 2020, we face a brave new world with all its glory and vice. We have to be able to rethink how we organize, prioritize and balance the conflicting demands of our work which is mostly valued based on our productive capacity, against our best personal and human assets - our mind, body and spirit. With popular slogans everywhere such as #DoWhatYouLove, #ChangeTheWorld, #NeverGiveUp #HustleHarder, no wonder we are all confused. I am never convinced that the number of logged hours is the best measure of effectiveness and impact in a work-life. In fact "The 4-hour Work Week", a book by Timothy Farris of San Francisco, had sealed my thoughts since over a decade ago, on what I already believed on this issue. A more recent book published that validated my thoughts on a similar subject was "Thrive" by Arianna Huffington.  At a personal capacity as well as in my organizational culture, I have always advocated for such topics less talked about - maintaining a healthy work-life balance - or simply in today's millennial slogan #YouDoYou. Parallel to my advocacy on the philosophy of positive "tech disruption", and how it has the ability to create a welcome change in our societies, if we regularly engage in doing something out of our comfort zone for our mind, body and spirit, I'm a great believer that we will find ourselves in a much better space as human beings, as well as be more effective in our work.

 

Focus on start-ups offering local solutions, IoT investments, GDPR implementation, electric cars gain, cyber attacks including malware, adware, the slow to steady growth for crypto-currency, solar energy proliferation, fight for privacy, robotic fine tuning, cable TV slows down, and live streaming peaks, women-in-tech.