Whether those measures taken by the authorities have taken social and economic considerations is not conclusive from our survey data, excluding neutral answers, we obtained 25,5% disagreement or strongly disagree versus 46,4% who agree or strongly agree on the statement “The measures taken by the authorities in response to the COVID-19 pandemic have taken into account social factors” and obtained 35,9% disagreement or strongly disagree versus 39,1% who agree or strongly agree on the statement “The measures taken by the authorities in response to the COVID-19 pandemic have taken into account economic factors”. However, it is apparent that “The measures taken by the authorities in response to the COVID-19 pandemic have taken into account health and safety factors” since we fnd only 14,1% in disagreement with the statement against 62,9% who are in agreement with the statement. It seems however, that the implementation of those measures was somehow relaxed as indicated by the responses collected against the statement “Implementation of the measures taken by the authorities in response to the COVID-19 pandemic was strictly followed” where 35,5% and 11,7 % who disagree and strongly disagree respectively with 20,6% and 4,4% who agree and strongly agree respectively. This means that there might have been violation of curfew hours or no respect for half ofce capacity, etc. On the other hand, some respondents reported inconsistency in the measures taken by their authorities “In general, I believe there was a lack of consistency in the measures taken by the authorities in response to the COVID-19 pandemic” as portrayed by the high agree rate of 40,3% and 8,9% strongly agree rate totaling together 49,2% approximately half of the respondents. Against only 20,5% who did not see this inconsistency. Inconsistency occurs when measures imposed to close certain types of commerce are not equally imposed on similar in nature commerce (hairdressers and nail salons for example or gyms and dancing studios). Furthermore, most respondents thought that “In general, the hours of functioning for my business were reasonable and allowed us to continue ofering our service / product” as indicated by the 51,3% who agree and strongly agree with the statement. Besides a large percentage of African SMEs feel more adapted to dealing with new waves of the pandemic or similar health crisis as seen from the responses collected against the statement “Personally, I feel I have gained a learning that would allow me to function reasonably in case of rising COVID-19 numbers and / or a second wave” where some 66,5% agree and strongly agree with it. Finally, concerning the measures imposed by the authorities, a large number (40,4%) are confdent that “In general, I believe the authorities will not impose very strict measures in case of a second COVID-19 or pandemic wave”.
D- Information Circulation
In this section we needed to know how efective the authorities were in circulating information about COVID-19 and raising awareness against the virus and what could be done as precautionary measures. In general, it seems that the authorities did a good job regarding “The information about the physical distancing, barrier gestures and other COVID-19 prevention actions were circulated regularly” as seen in the below chart.
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