Eng. Dr Francis “Tusu” Tusubira, former CEO of UbuntuNet Alliance received the Network Information and Infrastructure Service Award (NI&I) Service Award 2015. This was announced on 4 June 2015 at the African Internet Summit in Tunis, Tunisia.
Tusu, as he is popularly known in the community, holds a PhD (Southampton, UK), an M.Sc.E (New Brunswick, Canada), and a B.Sc. (Engineering) 1st Class Hons (Makerere University, Uganda). He is an internationally recognised information and communication technology (ICT) professional with experience and strengths in: managing change; policy formulation and management; project management from conception to implementation; ICT as a tool for development; regulation and regulatory issues; and ICT infrastructure design and implementation.
The NI&I Service award recognises the work he did during his tenure as CEO of the UbuntuNet Alliance. He raised the membership from 5 to 15 members. In the last 4 years of his tenure, he successfully implemented the AfricaConnect project with cross-border connections between NRENs in Eastern and Southern Africa, which contributed to a significant drop of connectivity cost for higher education and research institutions in many of the participating countries (97% drop in the case of Zambia).
He is serving in several other boards, including TENET, the research and education network of South Africa; RENU, the Research and Education Network of Uganda; the Internet Educational Equal Access Foundation; and the Global Development Leaning Network. He is member of the Advisory Panel to the Research and Education Networking Unit of the Association of African Universities.
The NI&I Service Award recognises people or organisations that have significantly contributed to have the development of Internetworking Services and Infrastructure in Africa and the Indian Ocean by dedicating time, resource, and vision to its enhancement. The award was initiated in 2009 under the instigation of Dr. Naku Nii Quaynor, inspired by his own prestigious John Postel Award (the first African recipient for his long run engagement in Internet service in Africa).
Watch his award acceptance video here. More information on Francis Frederick Tusubira can be found at his personal website.
Also awarded for service in the junior category was Tamon Akong Mukom, Training manager at AFRINIC. Presenting the award to him, Dr Nii Quaynor, the Convener of AfNOG had this to say:
“The blog articles he wrote on IPv6 are extremely useful guidance for managers. Given the number of trainings done, at least African network engineers have benefited from this training. This makes the leading force behind this training program (Mr Tamon) a very important part of ensuring that African network engineers will be ready to roll IPv6.”
We join the rest of the Af* community in celebrating the achievers.