Nigeria, Aug. 12 -- 21 years' ago, if someone in Lagos wanted to send an email to someone in Abuja - a distance of about seven hundred and sixty kilometres - that email would first travel thousands of kilometres to Europe or North America before returning to Nigeria. African Internet traffic was taking a detour around the world to reach its neighbours.

This detour was expensive and slow - burdening local businesses with high transit costs and leaving African Internet users with sluggish and unreliable connections.

In response to that challenge, the African Peering and Interconnection Forum was born in 2010. The goal was simple: to solve this fundamental connectivity problem. Together, network operators, technical experts and policymaker...