Privacy Policy

What we collect

When you register or use The Circle Africa, we collect the information you provide directly, including your name, email address, phone number, organisation, country, and a short bio. If you submit an innovation, we collect the details of that submission, including any evidence documents or images you upload. If you subscribe to Circle Intelligence or a funder premium plan, our payment processors collect payment details directly, we do not store your card or mobile money details ourselves.

Why we collect it

We use this information to operate the platform, including validating submissions, matching funders to innovations, sending you notifications about activity relevant to your account, and processing payments for premium services you choose to subscribe to.

Who we share it with

We use the following third party services to operate the platform. Each processes only the data necessary for its function.

• Stripe, for card payment processing
• Safaricom M-Pesa Daraja, for mobile money payment processing
• Brevo, for transactional email delivery
• An AI language model provider, for the site chat assistant, which only receives the text of your question, not your account details
• Cloudflare, for domain and DNS management
• Our hosting provider, which stores the servers this platform runs on

How long we keep it

We retain your account information for as long as your account is active. Payment transaction records are retained for seven years to meet tax and accounting requirements. If you request account deletion, we will remove your personal data within 30 days, except where retention is required by law.

Your rights

You can review and update your account details at any time from your profile settings. To request a copy of your data or full account deletion, contact us at privacy@thecircleafrica.com.

Contact

Questions about this policy can be sent to privacy@thecircleafrica.com.