Summary

  • Alain Aina helped establish AFRINIC, then joined a five-person WACREN team that offered research institutions individual help with IP resource applications.
  • WACREN invited applicants to have requests reviewed before submission, urged them to seek IPv4 and IPv6 resources, and pointed to an academic discount. Its announcement reports the service, not its results.

The glamour of the Internet rarely involves checking an application before it is sent. In 2014, that was precisely the job WACREN put on the table. After discussions at AIS14 in Djibouti, the research-network organisation reported that many African academic institutions found AFRINIC's IP resource request process complex. WACREN offered one-on-one assistance and a pre-submission review. Alain Aina was one of five people named on the team.

Aina had travelled a fair distance to arrive at a help desk. In an original interview with the Internet Society, he recalled early bulletin board systems in Benin and an email gateway that called Accra, then Montreal, twice a day. The connection cost too much to sustain. He described the first local web server and subsequent work bringing full IP services to Togo and other parts of West Africa. That history gives the paperwork a sharper edge: a network cannot connect its researchers with an address block it has never managed to obtain.

AFRINIC later called him one of its founding staff members and said he had been instrumental in setting up the registry. He also helped found AFNOG and taught in its network workshops, according to the Internet Society interview. Building an institution and teaching its future users are different jobs. WACREN's application team brought them into the same room.

The 2014 announcement was unusually practical. Institutions could send requests to the team before submitting them to AFRINIC. WACREN urged them to request IPv4 while the pool remained available, ask for IPv6 at the same time, and start using it. It also cited a 50% discount for educational and research institutions under an earlier AAU–AFRINIC agreement. A cheaper fee cannot fix a confusing form by itself. The five-person team's offer addressed the work of preparing a request that a registry could assess.

The 2019 Postel award recognised Aina's long service to Internet development. By then he had left AFRINIC in 2015 and become WACREN's chief technology officer, AFRINIC recorded. The award makes a satisfying photograph. The less photogenic achievement is the same career in miniature: make the network possible, then help someone else get through the door.