Strategies for Increased Internet Growth

This is a Position Paper commissioned by the African Internet Service Provider’s Association (AfrISPA) Board to explore and advocate for strategies that will enable African stakeholders to generate and host sufficient content on the internet to serve the needs of the African society. According to the document, access to this content will generate increased internet traffic and spawn the necessary infrastructure, making content the driver of internet development. The paper advocates that decision makers in Africa introduce measures to create the necessary infrastructure and to support the models that generate African content on the internet.

This paper is based both on research data and on internet tracking service results and develops a picture of the comparative situation of content and expropriation and establishes a basis for informed debate on suitable strategies to forge ahead. In commissioning the paper, AfrISPA seeks to reach out to the broader non-technical internet stakeholders and engage them in dialogue to satisfy users’ needs, and, consequently, the issues that need to be addressed to help increase content. This paper seeks to inform and generate debate on strategies to increase content.

The document suggests the following recommendations for internet growth:

1. Political institutions in Africa need to develop and adopt a resolution recognising and promoting growth of content in Africa. Such resolution is a basis for advocating that all governments review and repeal laws that impede content growth.
2. Africa Telecommunication Union, regional telecommunications organisations and regional internet organisations can increase the focus on content by incorporating projects and programmes to promote content generation and growth in Africa as part of their key programmes.
3. The establishment of an AfrISPA taskforce working with development partners and international civil society can document and coordinate efforts on content generation, and seek to create synergy in the area of content generation among political and economic blocks in Africa.
4. Discussion of content strategies through regional workshops should be organised by Internet Services Providers' Association (ISPA) and partners. A key focus is a discussion on models of content generation and to create a consensus on an enabling policy framework for content generation.
5. All internet stakeholders should commit to build content and host the content in the internet such that Africa will have 1 domain name per 100 people by 2010
6. African domain Names (AfriDNS) as the body promoting the growth of country-code top level domains (ccTLDs) can establish a tracking service for domains registered and advise countries on comparative national data towards achieving one domain per 100 people by 2010.
7. All Africa governments need to digitise and host their information on the internet by 2008.
8. AfrISPA with other stakeholders can work with international software companies to develop tools for capturing and processing local languages in Africa, so that a larger user group, particularly in rural areas, can understand content.
9. AfrISPA, working with United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), can tap and encourage the African Diaspora to enrich the local content with international experiences.
10. Encourage all national internet service providers (ISPs) associations and their members to give a free web page to their email customers to reduce barriers to content development on the internet. This is intended to encourage experimentation on content development as a first step to increased development.