Businesses are increasingly looking at how the Internet fits into their plans for growth, the study found Africans are moving beyond using the Internet as a vehicle for basic communications, and are starting to embrace the Web as a business tool, according to a survey by the African Internet Service Providers Association (AfrISPA).The report, “A Paradigm Shift to Stimulate Internet Growth Through Content,” released last week, finds that African businesses are increasingly looking at how the Internet fits into their plans for growth.“The culture of generating, processing and publishing content in Africa was lacking,” said AfrISPA Chairman William Stucke in a telephone interview. “But now Africans have realized that content is important to their socioeconomic development and so they are moving from being consumers to producers (of content),” Stucke said. For example, several organizations, commercial farmers and crop marketing companies in Zambia and Zimbabwe are producing local-language content relevant to small-scale farmers, offering advice on how to boost their production and market their produce.Currently, AfrISPA is involved in discussions with African ISPs (Internet Service Providers) about plans to give a free Web page or blog to all their clients and to develop a simple Web publishing tool to help farmers publish content.The author of the AfrISPA report, Muriuki Mureithi, said it was intriguing to realize that even in semirural areas, small and medium-size enterprises are looking for relevant business content on the Web. Technology Industry