By Iddi Yire, GNA
Accra, May 07, GNA – E-Governance and Internet Governance Foundation for Africa (EGIGFA) in collaboration with key stakeholders have marked the Fourth Universal Acceptance (UA) Day with a training workshop on internet governance in Accra.
The UA is a technical and policy pillar of internet governance ensuring all domain names and email addresses—regardless of script, language, or length—are accepted, validated, and processed by applications.
It is critical for digital inclusion, enabling non-English, French and Latin scripts ( Arabic, Chinese, local African scripts) to function uniformly online.
First introduced in 2023, the UA Day is an opportunity to mobilize local, national, regional, and global communities and organizations to champion UA on a global scale.
The 2026 UA Day, celebrated on the theme “Your Language, One Internet”, was organised by EGIGFA in collaboration with other key partners such as the Association of African Universities (AAU), Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the Ghana Domain Name Registry.
Mr Raymond S. Mamattah, the Founder and President of EGIGFA, in his opening remarks, said the UA was designed to ensure a multilingual, inclusive internet, allowing users to navigate online using their chosen domain name and email address.
He said this was the fourth time they were marking UA Day and that they were glad that they allowed the collaboration to be done, which was making it very effective for all of them to witness what they were now seeing today.
He said the EGIGFA, a young civil society entity operating in Ghana was established with the purpose of advocating and enhancing e-governance and internet governance activities in Africa and beyond.
He noted that the EGIGFA, since its establishment, had made a great impact in the digital space.
“The UA Day is one of such impacts that we are making in Ghana, because we are the lead in organizing this,” he said.
Mr Mamattah used the opportunity to challenge all other civil society organizations (CSOs) to come aboard so that they could play their part in ensuring that everyone comes onboard in compliance with UA, so that they would not miss out on the benefits that were there for them when they were UA compliant.
“As a civil society operating in the digital space, we realize the need for Ghana to join the flow in ensuring that our systems and technological infrastructure allow us to accept e-mails that have scripts that are not only the usual English or French characters, but our e-mails can process addresses that have our own local alphabets,” he stated.
He added: “The good news, however, is that due to technological advancement, we can now create domains and also e-mails that contain our local scripts.
“It is therefore important for us to test our systems to ensure that they are UA compliant.”
He said the training workshop was very important because at the end of the training, the participants shall all go back and ensure that their systems were UA compliant.
Dr Felicia Nkrumah Kuagbedzi, the Acting Coordinator, ICT, Communications and Knowledge Management, AAU, in her address said the theme for this year’s UA Day celebration envisions an Internet where every individual regardless of language, script, or background could access and use digital platforms without barriers.
“It challenges us to rethink the Internet not as a space limited by dominant languages, but as a truly global resource that reflects the diversity of its users,” she said.
She added, that “For Ghana, a country rich in linguistic diversity with languages such as Akan, Ewe, Ga, Dagbani, and many others this theme is especially relevant. It reminds us that language should never be a barrier to digital participation.”
Mr Abdul Hamid Yakub, National Programme Officer for the Communication and Information Sector, UNESCO Ghana, reiterated the need for the preservation of minority languages in Ghana in order to prevent them from extinction.
GNA.
Edited by Benjamin Mensah