UNESCO joins ICANN and partners worldwide in supporting the fifth annual UA Day. Organizations and communities are invited to submit event proposals through the UA Day Event 2027 Proposal Form between 8 October and 20 November 2026.
Events will take place in person, online or in hybrid formats, bringing together stakeholders at the local, national or regional level. Organizers are encouraged to involve governments, academia, technical communities, businesses and language communities, including partners working with domain names, email services and software development.
Proposed activities can help participants understand the benefits of UA and how to become UA-ready, explore ways to integrate IDNs and UA into academic curricula, put UA adoption into practice and share challenges and solutions, or bring regional partners together to review progress and update their UA strategies.
The shortlist of UA Day events will be announced by December 2026. For more information on Universal Acceptance and UA Day, please visit https://universalacceptance.day.
Since its launch in 2023, UA Day has brought together local, national, regional and global communities to raise awareness and advance UA adoption in line with UNESCO’s commitment to linguistic diversity and equitable access to information, supporting the objectives of the 2003 Recommendation concerning the Promotion and Use of Multilingualism and Universal Access to Cyberspace and the International Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022–2032). UA Day 2026 brought together 5,851 participants through 33 events across 30 countries and territories, conducted in 15 languages. With a growing emphasis on practical adoption.
Building on the experience and insights gained through previous UA Day events, UNESCO and ICANN published a joint policy brief, Advancing Universal Acceptance of all domain names and email addresses for a multilingual internet in 2026, offering practical recommendations for advancing UA and an indicator framework to support monitoring of its implementation. UA Day 2027 provides an opportunity to put this framework into practice, helping organizers assess national UA readiness, identify gaps, and inform priorities for action. Organizers are encouraged to draw on these assessments when designing their activities, and national UA assessments based on the framework will be taken into consideration in the selection of proposals.
The fifth annual UA Day Series’ preparations and activities come at the time when UNESCO is conducting the sixth monitoring cycle of the 2003 Recommendation, in which UA is considered as an indicator of universal access to cyberspace. This creates an opportunity to connect national UA assessments and local initiatives with broader efforts to monitor progress on multilingualism and digital inclusion.
In addition, UNESCO invites Member States to reflect their UA-related efforts in national reports under the sixth consultation. A complementary reporting exercise was developed for Non-governmental stakeholders that are encouraged to share their initiatives, good practices, challenges, and emerging needs through the dedicated questionnaire.
Join UNESCO, ICANN and the global Internet community in making UA a reality in your local context. Submit your proposal and help more people use the Internet in the language and script of their choice.
For any inquiries or further information, please kindly contact Xianhong Hu at x.hu@unesco.org and David Castillo at d.castillo-parra@unesco.org.
