INTRODUCTION Technological advancements, liberalisation, privatisation and progress in telecommunications regulation have ensured enormous growth in telecommunications markets in most African countries. For instance, the growth of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is very significant. VoIP, a technology that enables transmission of voice and data over packet switched IP-based networks, has recently become a popular means of transmission of voice and video traffic over IP networks. This is due to the cheaper option that it provides for phone calls, the flexibility of running a large number of “virtual users” through each network socket, the efficiency of combining phone calls with business data, the aspect of easily managing and maintaining the system since it is software, not hardware, based, and its support on both wireless and wired networks. The original design of VoIP was to support only voice traffic but recent developments have seen other real-time traffics such as video supported over the same platform. As the traffic is in real time, the IP platform on which VoIP is used should take care of the delay sensitive nature of both voice and video traffic. The work presented in this paper uses Semantic Web and Context-Awareness technologies to control congestion in VoIP networks caused by crisis/ emergency situations. ABSTRACT: IP networks can have difficulty coping with delay-sensitive VoIP traffics during emergency situations caused by fires and related disasters. During emergencies there is a huge increase in voice and video traffic, causing a huge strain on the network. The strain on the network is as a result of both essential and non-essential traffic. In such crisis situations, calls originating from or destined for rescue personnel, such as doctors and police, are considered essential. Any other calls from eyewitnesses and the public are considered non-essential, since they degrade the quality of service for the emergency response teams by consuming the scarce network resources. Providing the rescue team with the quality of service that they require necessitates network access restriction for non-essential traffic. In this paper, the authors present a voice and video service that