As a follow up from our 2009-2011 Strategic Plan, we started at the end of 2011 to draw our priorities for 2012-2014. AFRINIC has grown since 2009 and is facing, as many other similar organisations, the challenge of continuing to grow while maintaining the right balance between growth and sustainability. We are all operating in an environment constantly evolving with the Internet playing a critical role in all facets of our lives. An organisation like ours should be sufficiently flexible and resilient to transform itself and adjust to the ever-changing environment. In 2012, we introduced the first phase of AFRINIC transformation with a major operation restructuring followed by a profound review of the organisation's Bylaws. The restructuring has been implemented, and the new Bylaws ratified by the Board. These two steps were important in setting the foundation of an organisation that can continue to support the community while developing services and programmes that contribute to the development of the regional Internet governance ecosystem.

2012 Budget Achievement Highlights

AFRINIC continued to implement its new structure in 2012 while working on various projects as planned. We ended the year with an overall positive exercise even though our target in terms of revenue (membership) was not met. Several factors contributed to the situation with the adjustments required to effect the new structure being the most culpable. Our operating costs grew by 18% compared to 2011 while our revenue increased by 19% during the same period. The table below gives a summary of the forecast financial situation as of December 2012 (All in USD). The numbers for 2012 have not yet been audited and so remain provisional.

Table-1: Overview of 2012 financial situation

2013 Corporate Orientations

AFRINIC's operational budget for 2013 is based on a series of priorities identified through feedback from the community and our strategic goals for 2013. Three key elements support our activity plan and budget:

• Relevance: Continue playing our critical role in Number Resources Management.
• Efficiency: Continue to improve productivity and financial stability
• Resiliency: Adjust Organisation structure to evolve in close alignment with continuously changing environment/ecosystem

The foregoing three elements (hereinafter referred to as RER) will constitute the ongoing goal for AFRINIC during the coming years.

The 2013 budget has been formulated around Activity Plans that are aimed at addressing the immediate needs aimed at further supporting small Network operators of all kind to access Number resources while at the same time increasing overall membership value for existing members. With the new Bylaws adopted by the Board, the budget has also been designed to cater for its implementation and provides more transparency on our operations.

High-level Objectives

The High-level Objectives of AFRINIC in 2013 are defined around three major areas, which are: Effective Registration Services (ERS), Community Development (CD), Core (Internal) Infrastructure Stability (CIS), and Global Infrastructure Stability (contribution to) (GIS). Below are some of our Objectives.

a. Improve members Service and value (ERS)

b. Further develop Training and Capacity Building programme (CD)

c. Become a reliable source of Critical Internetworking Information (CIS/GIS)

d. Continue to work toward Financial Sustainability (ERS)

e. Continue to raise Operations excellence (CIS)

f. Adjust Organisational Behaviour to Environment evolution

   a. Prepare to serve an evolving stakeholders base (ERS)

      i. Associate Members ii. Mobile Network Operators

      ii. CDN and Mobile Broadband Operators

   b. New emerging needs/issues to be watch

      i. Cyber-security and related Online safety issues

      ii. Internet Governance (Advocacy for openness and bottom-up multi-stakeholder system

      iii. Promotion and support Inter-Networking best practices

Budget Overview

Operational Budget Summary

We are planning a 16% increase for 2013 in terms of membership revenue compared to the 2012 budget. Our operational expenses is, however, expected to grow by 14% which computed allow us to expect a surplus of USD 85,000 at the end of the exercise. The table below gives a summary of the budget. More details can be found in section 7 of this document.

Table-2: 2013 Budget summary

Capital Expenditure (CAPEX)

In general terms, our CAPEX in 2013 will significantly grow compared to the previous year mainly because of the upgrade and renewal of our core infrastructure and project to move to a fully virtualized environment. We have also planned for Capital expenditures for the expansion of some of our community support projects such as DNSSec, RPKI, RSCP(1) and DSP(2)

Table-3: 2013 CAPEX summary

Membership Growth

Our budget is based on a planned 21% membership growth in 2013 for a total income of 3.5 million. The biggest growth is expected in the low level categories (Extra-Small to Small), which will account for 33% of our expected growth. It is to noteworthy that this forecast revenue does not take into consideration changes in categories (which will result from additional allocation to existing member during the course of the year), which will only be reflected in the 2014 budget as impact of change in allocation size is only computed in membership fee category during the next year's billing exercise.

1. RSCP: The Root Server Copy Project is a project that supports deployment of Anycast instances of Root Servers in Africa region. AFRINIC currently work with four RO (L, I and F)
2. DSP: The DNS support Programme is a programme launched by AFRINIC in 2012 to support ccTLDs across by offering them to host one of their DNS on our Anycast infrastructure. We are planning to deploy few nodes of the platform across AFRICA in 2013

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