To conduct this study, PowerSoft Africa and the Coalition for Digital Africa analysed a substantial amount of statistical material and conducted a survey of more than 200 managers of various companies and organisations in the Internet and domain name industry from all regions of Africa.  The last time a similar study was carried out was in 2016, and when comparing the data from the 2016 and 2023 studies, we can observe significant progress across the African countries.  

The African domain name space consists of 54 country code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs) (such as .ZA for South Africa, .TN for Tunisia), six Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) (such as .الجزائر (for .Algeria), .مصر (for .Egypt), and three City TLDs (.CAPETOWN, .DURBAN and .JOBURG).  Since July 2017, Internet users can also register domain names under the new generic Top Level (gTLD) .AFRICA.

The study highlights that in November 2023, the total number of domain names registered under African ccTLDs was just over 4.33 million, which is twice as much as in 2016.  However, it should be noted that this significant difference is partly due to the fact that a few of these ccTLDs have often been used by malicious third parties for cybersquatting and other illicit activities such as .CF (Central African Republic) or .GQ (Equatorial Guinea). 

The study shows that the top 10 African ccTLDs by volume of domain names (led by .CO.ZA) have 92% of all registered African domain names and that Africans register domain names mainly “in countries where the local hosting industry and web development sector has developed sufficiently to create demand for local domains, i.e. mostly in South Africa, Egypt, Mauritius, Nigeria, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Tunisia, and Morocco.”  In addition, approximately 1% of the domain names registered under the gTLDs are registered by Africans.  This represents 1.4 million domain names, the majority of which (approximately 1.2 million) are .COM domain names. 

In terms of access to the Internet, Africa still falls short of global values, with an average Internet penetration of 43% (29% in 2016) compared to a world average of 68% (50% in 2016).  The gap is even more extreme between African countries – as an example, the penetration rate for Eritrea is only 7% as opposed to 85% for Kenya.  This is explained by the lack of digital infrastructure in certain parts of Africa as well as high Internet access costs.  These figures are not surprising when considering that the average African would need to spend 4% of their monthly income to get as little as 1GB of Internet data per month.

Nonetheless, the number of African domain names has increased as infrastructure rollout has increased in many countries.  The authors of the study expect this trend to continue, projecting an average annual overall growth across the continent of 12.4%.

Authored by the Anchovy News team.