Uweza holds a record of what children can do. That deserves a plain answer rather than a policy written to be unreadable. Everything below is how the system actually behaves — each one is a rule the database enforces, not an intention — and the last section is what we have not built yet.
01
A child under sixteen cannot consent to being published
Nothing a scholar writes or says is published outside Uweza without consent. For anyone under sixteen, that consent is a guardian’s rather than the child’s.
The threshold is decided by age where we know it, and only falls back to school level where we do not. That distinction is not pedantry: deciding by level alone would quietly enrol a fourteen-year-old in an advanced class into consenting for themselves, and would ask a twenty-six-year-old at university for a guardian’s phone number.
02
We do not keep the audio a scholar sends us
A voice message sent to Uweza on WhatsApp is transcribed and the recording is discarded. The only audio stored is audio we send out, and it is kept for thirty days so the network can deliver it.
Amara does not reply in a voice by default, and may never use a cloned voice without recorded consent from the person it belongs to. A voice is a likeness.
03
A recording can be withdrawn, and withdrawal erases it
Scholars and speakers contribute recordings to help Uweza teach in Cameroonian languages. Any of them can be withdrawn at any time.
Withdrawal is not a flag that hides a file. The database will not hold a withdrawn recording with its audio still attached — the row cannot exist in that state.
04
We record what a learner did, never what they said
Usage data carries page views, time spent, and whether something was completed. It carries no message content, no answers, and no free text a scholar typed.
This is the line we drew and the one we think matters most: evidence of engagement is not surveillance of thought. Anything a scholar would be alarmed to find on an administrator’s screen does not belong in that part of the system at all.
05
Usage data is deleted after ninety days
Raw usage events are removed after ninety days, once the daily totals they contribute to have been written. The totals carry no individual record.
A Capability Passport is the opposite and deliberately so: it is meant to last, because a record that expires is no use to someone proving what they can do years later, in a country nobody planned for.
06
A Passport is private until the scholar makes it public
Nothing is published by default. A scholar chooses to make their Passport shareable, and can stop. A public Passport shows what was established and how — whether a machine re-ran it, a board confirmed it, or a panel of people sat through it.
Outcomes — what came of it, an admission, a job, a scholarship — are never on the public page. "Did not get the scholarship" is a fact about a person that belongs to them.
What we have not finished
- A scholar cannot yet download everything we hold about them in one action, or ask for it all to be deleted in one action. Both can be done by asking us; neither is a button yet, and it should be.
- Our data is stored outside Cameroon, with the hosting providers the platform runs on. We have not yet published which, or completed a formal assessment against Cameroon’s 2024 personal data protection law.
- The ninety-day deletion of usage data runs when it is invoked rather than on an automatic nightly schedule.
We would rather you read these here than find them yourself. They are being worked on in that order.
Ask us anything about your own record, or a child’s, and we will answer it: hello@uweza.africa. A guardian may ask for everything we hold about their child, and we will send it.
Why the platform is built this way