Like Rwanda, several other African countries have shown interest in hosting more content locally to encourage an increase in production and attract new users.

A recent report by the Internet Society, Promoting Content in Africa, says there has been a slowdown in Internet growth in Africa.

This it says is due mainly to a lack of local content and the fact that majority of content - both international and locally developed, is hosted outside most African countries, typically overseas.

Rwanda had used multiple international links to access content hosted in the U.S. which made Internet slow and expensive, explains Internet Society's Fellow, Bastiaan Quast.

"In order to make the Internet faster and more affordable, the government began efforts to host more content locally," he said. "They began by addressing some of the large content providers such as Google, who set up a local mirror for their content. Similarly, Akamai set up a Content Delivery Network (CDN) which brings local mirroring for other websites that are customers of Akamai."

The country now has a strong monetary incentive to host content locally as a landlocked country that incurs expensive cost of routing Internet traffic from overseas, and there are other countries in a similar position.

Quast added: "In Tanzania, I spoke to a number of ISPs from Zanzibar which currently connect to mainland Tanzania using microwave connections rather than a fiber optic cable. This is another case where loading content from afar is expensive. Even in places which have less of a monetary incentive, there is a lot of interest in hosting locally, such as Kenya and Tanzania. Part of the reason is that this helps build a domestic ecosystem of know-how and expertise, which can further develop the IT ecosystem in a country."

Hosting locally will help get the plethora of user-generated content (such as Facebook posts and Whatsapp messages) being created in local languages across Africa online.

With payment mechanisms such as crowdfunding sites Patreon and Bitpesa for Bitcoin-related payments, making payment within African countries would be easier through platforms like M-PESA to fund local content such as articles, books, music, video games etc.

This would eventually bring more people online and improve the adoption rate of the Internet in Africa.

Encouraging localisation

Several efforts geared at achieving that in the past seem ineffective. In 2010, Google launched Google Baraza but it - as well as other initiatives - had limited impact on localising digital content which, according to the Africa Research Institute, was due largely to their only appealing to Africans who are already online.

In the following years, telcos picked up the development of more local content hoping to move many of the more than half a billion mobile phone subscribers online but the strategies designed to tap into local traditions and garner more online web users were not as effective.

Hence, the situation begs to find alternatives to discourage content being hosted outside Africa though developers are free to host abroad.

Quast said: "In my opinion, the best way to encourage content localisation is to show stakeholders such as ISPs and government that it is in their best interest to do this. In economic terms this is a collective action problem. The stakeholders can all benefit, but they need to organise in order to do so. IXPs make for a good starting point since they already do this by providing local links between ISPs, and providing local hosting (in the beginning) is a logical next step."

He cites the high cost of power and the reliability of its supply as barriers to hosting locally, and suggested that governments could designate priority zones for data centres where there is little risk of power outages.

Quast also said that the misconception that local hosting is less reliable should also be removed so that developers could see it as a premium service that will cost slightly more but provides websites with important improvements such as more visitors, more pageviews etc.