How we look after your information

1.Who we are

“AfriTutor”, “we” and “us” mean the companies below. The company responsible for your information (the “controller”) depends on where you use AfriTutor:

• UK and everywhere outside Nigeria: AfriTutor Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales (company number 17502907), registered office Suite RA01, 195-197 Wood Street, London, E17 3NU. AfriTutor Ltd is the controller.
• Nigeria: AfriTutors Scholar Hub Limited, registered in Nigeria (Corporate Affairs Commission) (RC number 9922554), 106 4th Avenue, Gwarinpa, FCT Abuja, Nigeria, and AfriTutor Ltd decide together how your information is used, so they are “joint controllers”. AfriTutor Ltd runs the AfriTutor platform and answers privacy questions and requests for both companies, and AfriTutors Scholar Hub Limited runs AfriTutor in Nigeria. You can contact either company and use your rights against either of them.

For anything about your information, email hello@afritutor.co.uk. You can also write to us at either address above. If you use AfriTutor in Nigeria, please say so, so the right team can help.

This policy covers the AfriTutor website and web app, our lesson rooms, our WhatsApp support line and our forms. It applies to parents and carers, learners, students, tutors and mentors (including applicants), referees, schools, sponsors and anyone who contacts us.

2.What we collect

Everyone with an account

• Your name, email address and password (stored securely by our login provider; we never see your password).
• Your account type (parent, student, tutor or mentor), your country (UK or Nigeria) and time zone.
• Your profile photo, if you add one.
• Records of what you do on AfriTutor, such as bookings, payments, messages, reviews and reports you make.

Parents and carers

• Details of each child you add: their name, year group and, if you choose to share them, notes about any additional needs.
• The lessons, packs and group seats you book and pay for, and the messages you exchange with tutors.
• For group sessions for teenagers, your child's age, so we can check the session is right for them.

Learners (including children)

• What a parent or student tells us (see above), plus the learner's image, voice and anything they say, write or draw in lessons, which are recorded.
• When they joined each lesson room.

Students aged 16 and over

• The same as a parent account, for yourself. For some group sessions we ask your age to check you can join.

Tutors and mentors (including applicants)

• Your public profile: name, photo, headline, introduction, subjects and levels, qualifications, years of experience, languages, hourly rate and weekly availability.
• Eligibility answers: date of birth, whether you are a student, graduate or qualified teacher, your university or school, course, graduation year, best grade in your subject, teacher registration number (TRN or TRCN), whether you have the right to work self-employed and live in the country you tutor in, and, for mentors, your experience and who you'd like to mentor.
• Documents you upload: an identity document, an Enhanced DBS certificate (UK) or police character certificate (Nigeria), qualification certificates and anything else you choose to send.
• Your recorded video interview, its written transcript, and our team's and our AI tool's marks and notes on it.
• The names and email addresses of your referees, and their confidential answers.
• Your agreements to our teaching guides and mentor guides, and the version you agreed to.
• Payout details: in the UK, a reference to your Stripe account (Stripe collects your identity and bank details directly); in Nigeria, your bank, account name and account number, which we pass to Paystack. We keep only the bank name, account name and last 4 digits.
• Your earnings, payouts and our review notes about your profile and any changes to it.

Referees

• Your name, email address, how you know the applicant and for how long, and the answers you give on our reference form.

Lessons, messages and reviews

• Video and audio recordings of every lesson and group session, the whiteboard from each lesson, and who joined each room and when.
• Messages between families and tutors, and any reports about messages or reviews.
• Reviews (star rating, words, and the tutor's reply).

Payments

• What you paid, when, how much was refunded, and payment references from Stripe or Paystack. We never receive your full card number.

WhatsApp, forms and emails

• If you message our WhatsApp line: your WhatsApp number, profile name and messages.
• If you contact us as a school or sponsor: your name, role, organisation, contact details and what you tell us about your plans. We ask schools not to send pupils' names through our enquiry form.
• Anything you send us by email.

Technical information

• Like most websites, our servers and providers log basic technical information such as IP address, browser type and times of access, to keep the service running and secure.

3.Children and young people

Many of the people who learn on AfriTutor are children. We design the service around them:

• Parents are in charge. A parent or carer creates the account, adds each child, books and pays, messages tutors and can join any lesson. Children under 16 can't have their own account; they join lessons through their parent's account.
• Students aged 16 or over can create their own account and book for themselves. If you are under 16, please ask a parent to sign up instead.
• Group sessions: sessions for teens (13 to 17) are booked by a parent. Young adults' sessions are for ages 16 and over, and adults' sessions for 18 and over.
• Only the people who need it see a child's details. A child's name, year group and any notes about additional needs are seen by the parent, the child's own tutors and our team. Nothing about a child is shown publicly. Reviews show only the first name of the parent or student who wrote them.
• No advertising or profiling. We don't show adverts, we don't use children's information for marketing, and we don't track children across other websites.
• Safety first. Lessons are recorded, contact details can't be shared, and anyone can report a concern. See Safeguarding.

In Nigeria, the law treats everyone under 18 as a child, and a parent or guardian gives consent where consent is needed for a child's information. In the UK, we follow the ICO's Children's code (the Age Appropriate Design Code).

If you are a young person and want to know what we hold about you, or want something deleted, you can contact us yourself at hello@afritutor.co.uk, or ask a parent to help.

4.How we use it, and our legal reasons

Data protection law says we need a legal reason (a “lawful basis”) for each use of your information. In the UK these come from the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018; in Nigeria, from the Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023. The main ones are:

Where we rely on legitimate interests, we have balanced our interests against yours, and you can object (see Your rights). Where we rely on consent, you can withdraw it at any time.

5.Lesson recordings

• Every one-to-one lesson and group session is recorded, video and audio, in our private video rooms (provided by Daily). Everyone is told before they join, and there is no button to stop the recording.
• The whiteboard is saved too, so the family can look back at it.
• Only the people in the lesson can enter the room: the tutor, the learner and the family. For group sessions, the mentor and families with a paid seat.
• The family and the tutor (or the mentor and families in a group) can watch the recording for 30 days after the lesson. Our team can watch it while it exists, for example to look into a complaint, a refund request or a safeguarding concern.
• Recordings are deleted automatically 90 days after the lesson.

We use recordings to keep everyone safe, to settle disagreements fairly and to help families review lessons. We never use them for advertising.

6.Safeguarding

Keeping children safe comes first. To do that:

• Phone numbers, email addresses, links and social media handles are automatically blocked in profiles, messages, reviews and booking notes, so all contact stays on AfriTutor.
• Messages can't be edited or deleted once sent, and our team can read any conversation when needed, for example after a report.
• Anyone can report a message or review. Our team reviews every report and can suspend accounts.
• Messages to our WhatsApp line that may be about a child's safety go straight to a person.

If we believe a child or adult may be at risk of harm, we may share relevant information, including recordings and messages, with the police, children's social care, the Disclosure and Barring Service, the relevant authorities in Nigeria, or a school's designated safeguarding lead (for pupils on a school programme). We will do this without telling you first if telling you could put someone at risk. The law allows this.

7.Tutor and mentor checks

Before anyone can teach on AfriTutor, our team checks their identity, eligibility, qualifications, a recorded interview, two references, and a background check: an Enhanced DBS certificate in the UK, or a police character certificate in Nigeria.

• Background checks may show criminal offence information, which the law protects specially. In the UK we use it under the condition for safeguarding children and individuals at risk in the Data Protection Act 2018, and only to decide whether someone can teach safely.
• Only our team can see your documents, interview, references and our marks. Families see only your public profile once you are approved.
• Referees' answers are confidential: only our team sees them, never the applicant.
• Your date of birth is used only to check you are old enough (18 to tutor, 21 to mentor, 25 to mentor parents or adults) and is never shown publicly.
• For qualified teachers, we may check your registration number with the Teaching Regulation Agency (UK) or the Teachers Registration Council of Nigeria.

8.Automated tools and AI

We use a few automated tools. None of them makes decisions about you on its own.

Tutor and mentor interviews

• A speech-to-text service from OpenAI turns your recorded interview answers into text.
• An AI model from Anthropic (Claude) marks the transcript against the same criteria for every applicant and writes a short summary for our team. It is told never to consider age, gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion, disability or any other personal characteristic.
• A member of our team reviews every application and makes every decision. Nobody is turned down by the AI. You can ask us to explain a decision or to look at it again.

Eligibility checks

• Our system checks your eligibility answers against our published rules (for example, age and grades) and tells you straight away if something doesn't meet them, so you can correct a mistake. If you think it's wrong, email us and a person will look at it.

WhatsApp assistant

• Our first replies on WhatsApp come from an automated assistant using an AI model from Anthropic. It answers from general information about AfriTutor and can't see any account.
• It hands over to a person whenever you ask, whenever a question is about your account, a payment or a complaint, and straight away if a message might be about a child's safety.
• Please don't send card details, passwords or children's personal details on WhatsApp.

Contact-detail filter

• An automatic filter blocks phone numbers, emails, links and social media handles in text you write. It only stops the text being saved; it doesn't make any other decision about you.

We don't use our providers' AI services to train their models on your information.

9.Who we share it with

We never sell your information. Inside AfriTutor, people see only what they need: families see a tutor's public profile; tutors see the details of the families and learners they teach or who message them; our team can see what they need to run and protect the service.

We use these service providers, who handle information for us under contract and only on our instructions:

Stripe and Paystack are also responsible in their own right for some information, for example when they check a tutor's identity or prevent fraud, under their own privacy policies.

We may also share information:

• with the authorities to protect someone at risk (see Safeguarding), or when the law requires it;
• with a school or sponsor that arranges lessons for its pupils, limited to what's needed to run and report on the programme (such as attendance, lesson notes and progress summaries);
• with professional advisers, insurers or courts, if needed to deal with a legal claim;
• between AfriTutor Ltd and AfriTutors Scholar Hub Limited, to run AfriTutor in both countries; and
• with a buyer or new owner if our business is ever sold or reorganised, who would have to protect your information in the same way.

10.Sending data abroad

AfriTutor runs in the UK and Nigeria, and several of our providers are based in, or use servers in, the United States and other countries. This means your information may be stored or accessed outside the country you live in. If you use AfriTutor in Nigeria, your information is sent to and stored in the UK and other countries, including the United States.

When we send information abroad, we protect it by using one of these:

• a country the UK (or, for Nigerian users, the Nigeria Data Protection Commission) recognises as protecting personal data adequately;
• for US providers, the UK–US “data bridge” where the provider is certified under it; or
• contract terms approved for international transfers, such as the ICO's International Data Transfer Agreement or Addendum, or equivalent terms for Nigeria, together with any extra safeguards needed.

You can ask us for more information about these safeguards at hello@afritutor.co.uk.

11.How long we keep it

We keep information only as long as we need it. Then we delete it or make it anonymous.

12.Keeping it safe

• Information is sent over encrypted connections, and access is controlled so that each person can only see what they're allowed to.
• Tutor documents and interview videos are kept in private storage that only the tutor and our team can open.
• Lesson rooms are private, and each person's entry pass works only for their own lesson, and only around the lesson time.
• Card and bank details stay with Stripe and Paystack.
• Only a small number of our team can see payment information and the log of our team's actions, and every action our team takes on an account is logged.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach puts your rights at risk, we will tell you and the regulator (the ICO in the UK, and the Nigeria Data Protection Commission for Nigerian users) as the law requires, usually within 72 hours of finding out.

13.Your rights

Wherever you live, you can ask us to:

• see the information we hold about you and get a copy;
• correct information that is wrong or incomplete;
• delete your information;
• restrict how we use it while a question is sorted out;
• object to us using it, where we rely on legitimate interests;
• move information you gave us to another service, in a common format;
• withdraw consent, where we rely on it (this doesn't affect what we did before); and
• not be subject to decisions made only by a computer that significantly affect you. We don't make decisions like that.

To use any of these rights, email hello@afritutor.co.uk (with the subject “Privacy request” or “Delete my data”), or send “Delete my data” to our WhatsApp line. Tell us the email address or phone number you use with us. Parents can make requests for their children. You can also update your name and your children's details yourself in your dashboard.

It's free. We may ask you to prove who you are. We'll reply within one month, or tell you within that month if we need up to two more months because the request is complex.

Some rights have limits. For example, we may need to keep payment records for tax, or keep messages and recordings while a safeguarding concern is being looked into. If we can't do what you ask, we'll explain why.

14.Complaints

If you're unhappy with how we've handled your information, please tell us first at hello@afritutor.co.uk (you can use any format, including WhatsApp). We'll acknowledge your complaint within 30 days, look into it and tell you the outcome without undue delay.

You can also complain to the regulator:

• UK: the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint or 0303 123 1113.
• Nigeria: the Nigeria Data Protection Commission (NDPC), at ndpc.gov.ng.

15.Cookies

We only use the cookies we need to make AfriTutor work. When you sign in, we set a cookie that keeps you signed in securely as you move between pages. Without it, you couldn't use your account, so the law doesn't require us to ask for your consent first.

• We don't use analytics, advertising or tracking cookies.
• When you pay, you go to Stripe's or Paystack's secure checkout page, and in lessons you use Daily's video service. These providers may use their own cookies or similar technology, needed to make payments and video calls work securely.

If we ever want to add other cookies, we'll update this policy and ask for your consent where the law requires it.

16.Emails and marketing

We send emails you need, such as sign-in emails, alerts about unread messages, booking and group session updates, and reference requests. We don't send marketing emails unless you've agreed to them, and every marketing email will have an easy way to unsubscribe.

17.Other websites

Our pages sometimes link to other websites, such as GOV.UK or our payment providers. We aren't responsible for how they use information, so please read their privacy policies.

18.Changes to this policy

We'll update this policy when the way we use information changes, and change the date at the top. If a change is important, we'll also tell you by email or in your dashboard before it takes effect.

See also our Terms of Service and how we keep lessons safe.