Impact of Locally Relevant Content

The development of locally relevant Internet content that is attractive to users has been shown to have a positive impact on Internet adoption. As the infrastructure necessary for Internet access is becoming more available in developing countries and emerging regions, efforts to increase Internet adoption rates are now focused on the development of such content. However, the impact of such efforts on Internet adoption rates will be limited if the infrastructure and enabling environment for local hosting and content delivery is overlooked.

In many developing countries and emerging regions, the vast majority of content accessed by local users is hosted abroad. As the content must traverse often expensive and sometimes under-provisioned international links, this can have a significant impact on the economics of access as well as the user experience.

The focus of this workshop is on the impact of locally relevant content on the ecosystem, and the enabling environment needed to encourage the creation and local hosting of content, by local content developers as well as international content delivery networks. It will discuss the challenges to local users such as the costs imposed on ISPs, transit costs to deliver the content to local users and the diminished user experience.  

The case study of the local hosting dynamics and content development in Rwanda will be used to frame the discussion and outline the lessons learned.  We will examine the impact of increased local content creation and hosting, and how this will be essential to help meet the relevant WSIS Action Lines goals for Internet development.