Lucky Masilela has been elected as a co-recipient of the African ICT Champion Award 2017 by the African ICT Alliance (AfICTA) on the eve of the 5th AfICTA Summit  in Abuja, Nigeria.

The Alliance promotes the use of the Internet to advance Africa’s development in health service delivery, e-government, e-commerce, job creation and other areas important to Africans’ standard of living.

Masilela’s best known role is as CEO of ZACR (ZA Central Registry) NPC where he was able to defend the rights of the delegation of .africa  geographic Top Level Domain (gTLD) as a new digital identifier for the continent. The .africa domain was commercially launched earlier this year and has attracted well over 11 000 successful domain name registrations.

He is also the long-standing former chairman of the South African Communications Forum, a councillor of the B-BBEE ICT Sector Council, a board member of AFRINIC, and former deputy chairperson of the ICT Policy Review Panel (South Africa).

Under his leadership, ZACR has registered more than 1,1-million .za domains and also introduced the city domains of .joburg, .durban and .capetown.

According to the AfICTA: “For his work in bringing these opportunities to Africa, Lucky Masilela is nominated for the AfICTA Africa Champions Award.” The Africa ICT Champion is a registered trademark award of AfICTA to recognise business leaders in Africa who have distinguished themselves on Africa’s journey to an Information Society.”