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NAIROBI/KAMPALA (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - When Uganda ordered an internet shutdown on the eve of the presidential election, groundnut seller Susan Tafumba’s trade collapsed.
The 34-year-old sells groundnuts at Kampala’s Nakawa market, but much of her business now comes through a mobile phone app that customers use to order goods to be delivered to them by motorcycle taxis.
“Usually the app gets us more profit than those people who come on a daily basis to the market, but we lost customers,” said Tafumba, one of countless small traders whose increasingly tech-dependent livelihoods were hit by the shutdown.