The small West African nation of Benin has become the country to reserve its dotAfrica (.africa) domain name.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) opened applications for new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) in 2013. Applications for .africa as well as the likes of .nike have been applied for.

And South Africa’s ZA Central Registry (ZACR) has thus far passed ICANN'S ‘initial evaluation phase’ in mid-2013 to manage the domain name.

ZACR has said that it could start officially launching .africa in March 2014. The ZACR in the meantime has asked for countries to reserve a name as well as propose any concerns.

But as the date for the launch nears, Benin has become the first country to reserve its .africa country name.

West African nation Benin has a population of just over 10 million.

“Benin was the first African country to reserve a name—Benin.Africa—and four other countries have nominated entities to submit names on their behalf. Aside from Benin, these countries are Mauritius, Senegal, Algeria and Niger,” says Alice Munyua of the AUC and ZACR dotAfrica project.

“Other countries need to place their important names on the RNL or they will miss out, and risk seeing names being taken by commercial and other entities when the Reserved Names List process closes in February 2014,” said Ms Munyua.

The ‘Government Reserved Names Policy’ is intended to protect various categories of names associated with individual African States.

Governments receive priority in registering certain categories of names, including the names of countries, regions, provinces, governments and government departments.

Also included are other domain names that relate directly to official governmental initiatives, such as the promotion of trade or tourism.