Promoting Content in Africa
The Internet Society launched the report “Promoting Content in Africa”. The study investigates the reasons why Internet adoption is stagnating in Sub-Saharan Africa, in spite of great improvements in connectivity infrastructure and affordability. Barriers to content availability and distribution seem to play an important role on this trend. The report points to the importance of fostering locally created content, available in familiar languages (which are many times different from the official national language). It also highlights the importance of the economic and regulatory environments. Lack of online payment mechanisms stifle commerce and advertisement. At the same time, legal restrictions on content negatively impact the willingness of international providers to make content available in a country and encourage self-censorship from local actors. The deployment of infrastructure to facilitate content distribution, such as ISPs and CDNs, was also mentioned as key elements on the report.
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