Sauti and TruTrade together with medical experts Response-Med have developed and disseminated customized COVID-19 awareness and prevention materials including short animated clips and radio ads, specific to the agriculture supply chain actors in Uganda through Sauti and TruTrade digital platforms.

This report leverages the unique analytical perspective from Sauti East Africa to document traders’ changes in business behaviour in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. For this report, we present behavioural insights from our mobile-based market information platforms in four East African countries: Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda.

Sauti took the lead on increasing participation of women traders in select sectors through the expansion of its digitized platforms, specifically USSD/SMS and WhatsApp. The targeted project counties included Siaya, Makueni, Kilifi, Migori and Bungoma.

Sauti in collaboration with Danish Refugee Council (DRC) through the Market Monitoring project kicked off price collection activities across three different market locations: Nairobi, Kakuma and Dadaab.

In this quarterly report, we have analysed user growth and interactions with the Sauti platforms in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda. The Q2 2021 quarter saw 13,039 new users access the platform. Our Kenya platform saw the largest growth over the quarter, mostly driven by our feature expansion, which now includes: general health, business operations, and agriculture information. In all four countries, the majority of price requests remain within domestic markets, however, cross-border trade from Kenya has increased by nearly 20 percentage points since the Q1 2021 Report.

We are glad to announce that Sauti's trade and information platform is now available and accessible to anyone, anywhere via WhatsApp. Message "hello" on WhatsApp to +254 20 389 3576 and you'll be able to explore our free business and social services information, tailored for farmers, traders, and small businesses in East Africa.

We are glad to announce that Sauti's trade and information platform is now available and accessible to anyone, anywhere via WhatsApp. Message "hello" on WhatsApp to +254 20 389 3576 and you'll be able to explore our free business and social services information, tailored for farmers, traders, and small businesses in East Africa.

In this quarterly report, we have analysed user growth and interactions with the Sauti platforms in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda. Over the past three months, Sauti gained 2,717 new users. Most of this growth has come from our Tanzania platform which we launched in February earlier this year. In July, we added weather information to the Kenyan and Tanzanian platforms, which resulted in over 20 percent of information requests on each of these platforms in the past quarter.

After three years with Sauti, Mary Rowlatt has decided to step down as CEO to tackle new professional challenges as an independent consultant within the humanitarian and social innovation space. Looking ahead, Lance will serve in an interim CEO capacity to ensure a smooth transition to Sauti’s next stage of growth.