ISOC Rwanda joins the world to celebrate Universal Acceptance Day

By Elias Hakizimana.

Internet Society Rwanda Chapter (ISOC Rwanda) has on Friday, April 21st, 2023 joined the rest of the World to celebrate Universal Acceptance Day (UA) through a workshop on email administration.

Emmanuel Mfitumukiza, ISOC Rwanda Chapter Chairperson explained that UA is a technical requirement that ensures all valid domain names and email addresses can be used by all Internet-enabled applications, devices, and systems.

Led by Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG), a community-led initiative that was formed in 2015 and funded by ICANN, UA Day has been an opportunity to rally local, regional, and global communities and organizations around the world to spread UA awareness and to encourage UA adoption with key stakeholders.

”UA Day consisted of UA awareness and technical training sessions hosted by the UASG including its UA Ambassadors and UA Local Initiatives, ICANN, and interested global partners and organizations. The sessions aimed to engage and mobilize top technical and language communities, companies, governments, and Domain Name System (DNS) industry stakeholders to better understand the benefits of UA and how to make their own systems UA-ready,” Mfitumukiza explained.

Mfitumukiza highlighted the rationale of UA vis-à-vis the challenges around the use of software applications.

“While the DNS has changed in recent years, the checks used by many software applications to validate domain names and email addresses remain outdated. Many systems do not recognize or appropriately process new domain names. In addition, not all online portals are primed for the opening of a user account with a related email address. That is why awareness of and support for UA is critical for a truly global, multilingual Internet.” He said.

Benefits of UA

Statistics show that current Internet population is made up of more than 5 billion active users, and at least one billion more are expected to come online by 2023.

“Achieving UA for all valid domain names and email addresses is crucial to enabling consumer choice online and achieving digital inclusivity for all of these users. Further, there are important economic and social benefits of supporting multilingual Internet users in their ability to access and connect to ecommerce, local communities and governments, as well as to embrace and proliferate cultural traditions through language,” Mfitumukiza added.

Jules Nizeyimana, ISOC Rwanda vice-chairperson said that UA Day is very important for both Tech communities and internet users in general.

“This is a good day for IT Technicians to know what they can contribute for their respective institutions they work for, being email and Applications administrators, it is a good time for them to know that their systems or applications allow other systems using different languages to easily share information so that their job becomes more productive.”

UA meaning for industry players, academia

Mark Uzaruharanira, Information Security Engineer said: “UA Day helps us to easily connect with all the people we live together in a global village because many countries use different languages, but internet is built on one language. So, UA Day helps to communicate with people regardless of their language and locations.”

Bonita Muhirwa, a student at Mount Kenya University said: “We used to face different challenges while accessing information from different websites, for example Alibaba where it requires using domain names from China, I believe that UA will help to easily access information from across the globe.”

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