The Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) was hosted in a hybrid format by the Government of Ethiopia in Addis Ababa from 28 November until 2 December 2022, under the overarching theme: Internet for a Shared, Sustainable and Resilient Future. The IGF 2022 Outputs are available.
5,120 stakeholders from 170 countries participated in the 17th IGF. At the IGF venue in Addis Ababa, 2,520 participants collected their badges. The majority of the participants came from Ethiopia, USA, Brazil, China, Germany, Nigeria, Kenya, UK, India, Ghana, Italy and Russia.
64% participants indicated to be the first-time comers.
Gender representation was 56% male, 43% female and 1% self-identified as other.
About 2% of registered participants indicated to be members of parliaments from 35 different countries.
The forum also saw around 1% of registered media representatives. The biggest number of participants came from the civil society (32%) and Governments (29%), followed by the private sector (16%), technical community (11%), intergovernmental organizations (11%) and press (1%).
In terms of regional diversity, the majority of the participants came from Africa (44%), followed by WEOG (21%), Asia-Pacific (15%), GRULAC (8%), Eastern Europe (4%) while 8% indicated to be members of the intergovernmental organizations.
Below are the visual breakdowns of all participants per stakeholder group, region and gender.
Compared to IGF 2021, this year’s IGF saw an increase in representation of Governments (+10%), intergovernmental organisation (+3%); in representation of stakeholders from Africa (+25%), Asia Pacific (2%); and GRULAC (+2%). The number of stakeholders from Eastern Europe was significantly lower than that in 2021 (-28%), when the IGF was held in that region.
Regarding participation by the level of development of the country, based on the latest available HDI Index , there were about 33% from developed countries classified as "very high", and 67% from developing countries, not classified as "very high", with the stakeholder distribution as illustrated on the graph below.
The meeting’s live stream service attracted over 10,000 unique views. Over 27% of viewers were up to age 35.
Over 2,300 media articles were produced on IGF 2022. Major coverage came from the US (39%), followed by Ethiopia (23.4%) and India (15.8%) and included articles featured in AP News, VOA News and UN News. The press briefing hosted on 29 November resulted in 229 media articles, garnering 14.8 million unique visitors.
Full media coverage is available at the press page of the IGF website. The greatest volume of press coverage was in English (96,9%).
There were 212,500 social media posts on the IGF 2022 and its themes. This is a significant increase from the 11,000 posts seen last year. Engagement (clicks, shares, likes, etc.) was close to 300,000, significantly higher than the 27,000 recorded for IGF 2021. The cumulative potential reach across all platforms was 3.5 billion, up from 744 million last year.
Most of the social media engagement came from female users (58.8%). The majority of the social media interactions were among stakeholders of age 18 to 34 (+90%).
Close to 250,000 users interacted with the meeting’s official hashtags #IGF2022 and #ResilientInternet.
The livestream over IGF YouTube recorded close to 10,000 views. Users were mostly male (66.1%) between 25 and 44 years old (64%). The livestream was most extensively viewed in Ethiopia (+45%), followed by the USA, Russia, Brazil and India.
The meeting featured 293 sessions. Breakdowns per session type were: 1 Opening Session, 1 Opening Ceremony, 5 Main Sessions, 79 Workshops, 45 Open Forums, 29 Town Halls, 10 Launches and Awards, 31 Lightning Talks, 11 Networking Sessions, 20 DC Sessions, 7 NRI Collaborative Sessions, 31 Pre-Events (Day 0 Sessions), 5 High-level Leaders Track, 4 Parliamentary Track sessions, 1 Global Youth Summit, 2 BPF Sessions, 2 PN Sessions, 7 Closed Sessions, 1 Open Mic and 1 Closing Ceremony.
Organizations from five different continents joined the IGF Village with 60 booths to share their work missions with the Forum’s participants. The Village included representatives from all key stakeholder groups: governments and intergovernmental organizations, private sector, civil society and technical community.
There were also 34 remote hubs organized around the world: 67% in Africa; 9% in Latin America and Caribbean; 9% in Asia Pacific; 12% in WEOG and 3% in Eastern Europe.