A deadline for African governments to reserve dotAfrica (.africa) internet names has been pushed forward to end of March 2014 as less than 20 countries have participated in the process.

South Africa’s ZA Central Registry, in a statement, says it initially set a deadline in the first week of February for African governments to submit lists of important names of sovereign interest and national significance for inclusion in the dotAfrica ‘Reserved Names List’ (RNL) process.

Africa has over 50 nations but just 17 countries have engaged in the process thus far, according to a list provided by the ZACR.

The countries include Benin, Niger, Senegal, Mauritius, Ghana, Burundi, Algeria, Tanzania, Morocco, Namibia, Tunisia, Uganda, South Africa, South Sudan, Egypt, Gabon and Liberia. The African Union (AU) has also engaged in the RNL process as an entity, say ZACR representatives.

However, the ZACR does say that over 600 reserved names have been approved, with 26 names pending approval and no rejections thus far.

"As the envisaged May 2014 launch date for the new dotAfrica domain draws closer, it is now critical that all other African countries who desire a dotAfrica presence place their important names on the RNL," said Alice Munyua of the African Union Commission (AUC) and ZACR dotAfrica initiative.

Munyua’s reference to the May sunrise launch date of dotAfrica comes after the ZACR originally planned for this process to start in March this year. This in turn has resulted in general availability of the domain being pushed forward to later in 2014.

The ZACR has previously said that reasons for the sunrise delay included dealing with South African exchange controls and its name change from UniForum SA: a process that is under review by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

Nevertheless, the ZACR has been endorsed as the official operator of the dotAfrica registry and its dotAfrica ICANN application passed the initial evaluation phase.

This means the ZACR is now awaiting contracting terms from ICANN before launching dotAfrica in May 2014.