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100 hours in the dark in Uganda

100 hours in the dark in Uganda

NITA BHALLA and ALICE McCOOL 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. "Now, we are…
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Internet shutdowns in Africa threaten democracy and development

Internet shutdowns in Africa threaten democracy and development

TOMIWA ILORI, Doctoral Candidate and Researcher at the Expression, Information and Digital Rights Unit of the Centre for Human Rights, University of Pretoria MAGNUS KILLANDER, Professor, Centre for Human Rights in the Faculty of Law, University of Pretoria IT'S broadly accepted that there’s a close relationship between development and access to information. One of the first economists to make the link was Amartya Sen, who won the Nobel Prize in 1998 for his contributions to welfare economics. Increasingly over the past two decades, the internet has been a major factor affecting the right to development. The United Nations definition of…
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