- The CAIGA blueprint grew from a 2024 MoU between Smart Africa and ICANN to fast-track capacity building and continental coordination.
- Critics warn CAIGA risks centralising political power and bypassing AFRINIC’s bottom-up, multistakeholder processes.
Origins: A memorandum and two years of joint work
CAIGA — the Continental Africa Internet Governance Architecture — traces directly to formal cooperation between Smart Africa and ICANN. The organisations signed a Memorandum of Understanding in November 2024 that committed both parties to joint capacity development, outreach and research to boost African participation in internet governance. ICANN described the MoU as “a pivotal step to enhance Internet governance capacity development across Africa.” Smart Africa has presented CAIGA as the practical outworking of this collaboration: a continental architecture to help African states coordinate policy, build technical capacity and respond to crises affecting regional institutions.
Also Read: Smart Africa’s CAIGA: Collaboration or centralisation of power?
Why CAIGA: Stabilisation, sovereignty and coordination
Proponents frame CAIGA as a response to a specific problem: AFRINIC’s prolonged governance crisis. Legal disputes, contested elections and receivership in Mauritius left the continent’s regional internet registry in a fragile state; CAIGA’s advocates argue a coordinated continental mechanism could provide political legitimacy and rapid stabilisation where slower community processes have stalled. Smart Africa presents CAIGA as a means to protect African digital sovereignty and to harmonise national approaches so the continent can “speak with one voice” in global fora. Smart Africa’s public statements emphasise capacity building and a desire to avoid external actors dominating Africa’s internet agenda.
Also Read: AFRINIC’s community trust vs. Smart Africa’s political influence
How the initiative works — and why critics object
CAIGA’s proposed elements include a continental council, a permanent secretariat and mechanisms that allow political endorsement of governance reforms if membership processes do not reach agreement. Supporters say these are pragmatic fallbacks to unblock reform; opponents see them as routes to political override. Internet governance veteran Alice Munyua has warned that CAIGA risks creating “a new layer of governmental and regulatory authority positioned above AFRINIC’s elected board,” calling into question whether the same approach would be accepted for other regional registries. Scholar Milton Mueller similarly cautions that CAIGA could substitute political control for community governance and thereby undermine the multistakeholder model.
ICANN’s role: Facilitator or legitimiser?
ICANN insists its role is supportive, focused on training and inclusion, but its financial and technical participation has given CAIGA institutional weight. The 2024 MoU documents ICANN’s commitment to collaborate on research and capacity activities — a fact critics point to when arguing the global coordinator has lent legitimacy to a politically driven framework. Observers note the tension: if ICANN helps design a mechanism that permits political endorsement to substitute for community ratification, it must explain whether comparable approaches would be acceptable for other RIRs.
What the future requires: Transparency and safeguards
CAIGA was created to address real governance failures and to strengthen African agency over digital infrastructure. To avoid replacing one set of problems with another, reform must be transparent, widely consulted and explicitly compatible with the RIR system’s established rules. That means clear limits on political intervention, protections for technical independence, and rigorous community engagement — otherwise CAIGA risks trading stabilisation for centralisation. As critics and proponents agree in different words: Africa needs capacity and sovereignty, but not at the cost of the impartial, bottom-up processes that underpin the internet’s technical stability.
