Dear AFRALO members, The AFRALO leadership in partnership with the ICANN Global Stakeholder Engagement (GSE) team and At-Large Staff would like to announce the second AFRALO Universal Acceptance training session to be held on November, 17, 2022 at 13:00 UTC for 90 minutes. Please register here: https://icann.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcpdOqsqj4sG9counHKvIxO9ateHVhdxxGw Universal Acceptance is key to achieving a digitally inclusive Internet by ensuring that all domain names and email addresses – regardless of script, language, or character length – are accepted equally by all Internet-enabled applications, devices, and systems. This includes supporting all country code top-level domains (ccTLDs), new and long generic top-level domains (gTLDs), and Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs). We are calling upon our members to be the champions in their own communities by registering on the ICANN learn platform https://learn.icann.org<https://learn.icann.org/> and completing the Introduction to Universal Acceptance course, session II Why is UA important? Did you know that the next billion Internet users will not be users of the Latin script? Learn how to reach them and prepare your systems now for the future Internet! People’s communication, overall utility as well as experience on the Internet may be impacted if their email systems or websites are not compliant with Universal Acceptance. As part of this project, members are requested to perform the following tasks: 1. Any At-Large Structure (ALS) that has an email address with their own domain (not Gmail, Hotmail etc), should check if Email Address Internationalization is supported or not supported by their system. The link to use for the test is https://uasg.tech/eai-check/. 2. If an ALS has its own domain, it will work with GSE, the Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG) and UA Ambassadors to ensure that their online platforms are compliant with Universal Acceptance. 3. ALSes are to include awareness activities on Universal Acceptance at the local level. (ICANN GSE/IDN/UA teams and the UA Ambassadors are ready to help). 4. Yaovi Atohoun<mailto:yaovi.atohoun@icann.org> please add a blurb on the second UA session (objective) As reference and background, the first training session was held on Tuesday, 10 May 2022 . See wiki page for session details: https://community.icann.org/x/0Rh1Cw. To participate in the second training session to be held on Thursday, 17 November at 13 UTC. See wiki for session details : https://community.icann.org/x/dIUFDQ. and please register here: https://icann.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcpdOqsqj4sG9counHKvIxO9ateHVhdxxGw [cid:image001.png@01D8F372.20ED6600]