- CAIGA risks centralising authority and replicating AFRINIC’s governance failures.
- ICANN’s expanding influence raises concerns about external interference at a pivotal moment for Africa’s internet autonomy.
A new governance model emerging amid institutional collapse
The Continental Africa Internet Governance Architecture (CAIGA) is being promoted as a framework to harmonise internet governance across African states. In theory, it would enhance coordination, streamline policymaking and address long-standing structural fragmentation. But the proposal arrives at a moment when Africa’s internet ecosystem is already destabilised by the collapse of AFRINIC — a failed registry whose years-long governance crisis has left Africa’s IP-resource management in disarray.
Rather than representing a reset, CAIGA risks reinforcing the very conditions that enabled AFRINIC’s governance breakdown. The annulment of AFRINIC’s June 2025 election over a single unverified proxy dispute — an act that discarded valid votes and eroded trust — demonstrated how easily institutions can be captured without clear accountability safeguards. Critics fear CAIGA could magnify, rather than correct, these systemic weaknesses.
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Why it’s important
CAIGA’s draft structure provides few details on representation, authority, or recourse mechanisms. Without clarity on how civil-society groups, technical communities and the private sector would meaningfully participate, the architecture risks transforming multistakeholder governance into a veneer rather than a practice.
Multistakeholder processes work when power is distributed and procedural checks prevent domination by states or external actors. CAIGA, by contrast, appears designed to centralise decision-making at a continental level — creating a system vulnerable to political bargaining, opaque decision-making and regional imbalance.
This model sits uneasily with Africa’s bottom-up governance tradition, a principle originally emphasised during the development of the global RIR system, including by institutions such as the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), which stresses inclusivity and transparency in global digital policymaking.
ICANN’s recent actions further complicate CAIGA’s legitimacy. Its adoption of the controversial ICP-2 compliance document — pushed forward without full multistakeholder process — grants ICANN unprecedented power to recognise or derecognise regional internet registries. This has led to widespread fears that CAIGA could function as a channel for ICANN to consolidate authority at a moment when Africa’s governance landscape is most fragile.
ICANN’s attempted intervention in AFRINIC’s court-approved election and subsequent backtracking have reinforced perceptions that the organisation is losing control and over-extending its reach. Critics argue that CAIGA, far from strengthening Africa’s autonomy, might entrench ICANN’s ability to “pick Africa’s leaders” under the guise of compliance.
A reset is needed — but CAIGA is not it
With AFRINIC’s governance irreparably broken, many believe Africa urgently needs a reset rooted in transparency, accountability and genuine multistakeholder participation. CAIGA, as currently conceived, risks weakening these principles, not reinforcing them.
Until the continent establishes a trusted replacement for AFRINIC and rebuilds its governance foundations, CAIGA may be less a solution than a structural distraction — one that widens the opening for external interference rather than restoring African control.
