past three years, then in a controversial statement about the same": As the CEO of the DCA Registry Services Limited based in Kenya, Bekele had led a multi-national team of experts to prepare and submit an application for the DotAfrica (.AFRICA) generic Top-Level Domain. DotConnectAfrica has already submitted an application in May 2012 for the .africa (pronounced as 'DotAfrica') geographic name string to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) Miss.Africa Digital In 2007, Bekele initiated and launched the Miss.Africa Digital program as a gender-focused initiative targeted mainly at female youth audiences throughout the African continent. The program is intended to increase girl's personal involvement in early technology use and adoption with a view to improving their digital self-awareness and empowerment, and bridging the economic divide through employment or entrepreneurship The initiative was first launched and publicized during the ICANN gala event in Singapore and continued to ICANN Dakar. In 2015 the Miss.Africa Annual Seed Fund competition program was inaugurated, and runs Africa-wide, providing grants to women and girls that have submitted original projects in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). The grant assists these women to launch or further support their own initiatives and has been recognized as a global finalist by the ITU and UN Women Equals in Tech Awards Overcoming challenges Bekele's eight year .africa journey was not without challenges over the issues of accountability and transparency on the bid for .africa, including the African Union Commission(AUC) who allegedly disavowed the first endorsement they gave her organization DotConnectAfrica in 2009 to apply for the .africa gTLD, to subsequently request for the same directly from ICANN, at the ICANN 42 International meeting held in Dakar Senegal from 23–28 October 2011. AUC requested ICANN to include all similar name strings ".africa", ".afrique" and ".afriqia", in the list of "reserved names", to afford special legislative protection to the AUC to own these strings so as to make it unavailable to anyone, through a method of bypassing the formal application process of the ICANN's new generic top level domains (gTLDs). Bekele opposed to the AUC's request as it became known later that ICANN could not reserve the names for the AU, however ICANN did recommend to the AUC to use Government Advisory Committee to raise concerns that an applicant is seen as potentially sensitive or problematic, or to provide direct advice to the Board, so as