AFRINIC is one of the five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs).
In very simple terms it looks after the IP address allocations for the Africa region, while RIPE does Europe and the Middle East, ARIN handles North America, LACNIC Latin America and APNIC does Asia Pacific.
However the role of an RIR within the broader internet eco system is often a lot bigger than simply managing a database of IP addresses. To say that they only did that would be quite insulting to many RIRs.
As AFRNIC’s about page explains:
AFRINIC’s mission is to provide professional and efficient distribution of Internet number resources to the African Internet community, to support Internet technology usage and development across the continent and to strengthen Internet self-governance in Africa through a bottom-up, multi-stakeholder Policy Development Process (PDP).
There’s been a certain amount of instability and scuttlebutt surrounding AFRNIC over the past 12 to 18 months with the previous CEO announcing his departure back in April of this year and at least one candidate for the board election being embroiled in scandal in his native South Africa.
Against this backdrop AFRINIC is now seeking to hire a new CEO.
The role is based in Mauritius and while the job listing says that there will be an attractive package there are no details of what kind of salary scale it is. You would probably need to speak English and French if you wanted to get this gig, as the service region is dominated by those languages. I suspect the role would involve a fair amount of travel, both within the service region and to events organised by the other RIRs and ICANN.
