Preparing African higher educations institutions for IPv6 networking

The issues related to the depletion of the Internet Protocol (IP) version 4 (IPv4) unique identifiers (IPv4 Addresses) and the deployment of its successor, IPv6 are of paramount importance to all stakeholders including government, technical communities, civil society, private sector and academia. In Africa, many initiatives, mainly spearheaded by AfriNIC, the African Internet Number Registry, are in place and aim at sensitizing, training and accompanying African adoption of the new protocol. Specifically targeted are the African higher education institutions, the networks of which support e-learning, research and innovation. This policy brief elaborates on why IPv6 should be adopted within African higher Education institutions and how the academia and its leaders could fastrack IPv6 migration in the Africa region