Cairo, Egypt - Director of Telecom Planning and Services, National Telecom Regulatory Authority (NTRA)
Since March 2006, Ms. Arida has worked as the director for Telecom Planning and Services at the Egyptian National Telecom Regulatory Authority (NTRA). Prior to her work at NTRA, she worked at the Telecom Strategic and Technical Planning Department of the Egyptian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology beginning in September 2001. During this period, she was involved in a number of successful initiatives that served Egypt’s national plan, “Building its Information Society”. This includes the Free Internet Initiative (January 2002), the PC for Every Home Initiative (December 2002), and the Broadband Initiative (May 2004).
Ms. Arida started her career as a network engineer at the Cabinet Information and Decision Support Center responsible for DNS operation and Internet access, and was a member of the team that introduced the Internet in Egypt.
Ms. Arida is also an active member of the global Internet community. She serves as the co-chair of the Arab Working Group on Arabic Domain Names and is the former chair of the Arabic Internet Names Consortium (AINC). She has been involved in setting up an Arabic domain names test bed in the context of the ADN pilot project. Ms. Arida is also a member of the Egyptian Working Group on Internet Governance and the Internet Society Chapter of Egypt. She has worked on establishing the “AfriNIC mirror center for technical operation” in Cairo, as well as launching a Regional Internet Resolution Server (RISR) in Egypt in cooperation with VeriSign. Ms. Arida holds a bachelor's degree in Electronic and Communication Engineering from the Faculty of Engineering Cairo University, Egypt.