COVID-19 has imposed extreme challenges for East Africa’s micro and small enterprise traders, many of which rely on ease of cross-border movement for their profits. Others depend on gathering at local marketplaces where maintaining social distance is challenging. While immediate national health policies have focused on limiting the health and human costs of COVID-19, East Africa’s traders have been forced to make dramatic changes and adapt their business and market behaviour to the new realities of the global pandemic.

In all this, understanding the economic shifts in East Africa’s small-scale trade sector – one of the most important factors for poverty alleviation and women’s economic empowerment – will be paramount to designing policy and interventions that sufficiently addresses the economic toll of COVID-19.

An added challenge to collecting this information has been the need to prevent the spread of COVID-19 through social distancing. This has resulted in a shift from in-person data collection, to digital, reducing the amount of data collected from low-technology communities. 

Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, Sauti has been leveraging the use of our Trade & Market Information Platform in low-technology areas to study the change in behaviour of cross-border traders during the pandemic. 

From our mobile-based market information platform, we have been able to record behaviour insights of traders from three East African countries: Kenya, Rwanda, and Tanzania. The market and trade information requested by users, joined with supplementary demographic user data, gives us unprecedented opportunities to present near real-time findings on business behaviour, such as top traded commodities and market destinations. Further, the longitudinal nature of the data allows us to identify significant shifts in business behaviour, including before and after the onset of COVID-19, as well as the continued impact of the pandemic in the last year.