Terms and Conditions

What this platform is for

StartHub Africa runs programmes for entrepreneurs. On this platform you can describe your business, work out your costs and break-even, assess your business across six areas, and apply to programmes. You can use the tools without applying to anything.

Your account

• You sign up with an email address and a password, or with a Google account.
• A password needs at least 10 characters, including a letter and a number.
• We do not check your password against lists of passwords leaked from other services, so please do not reuse one.
• You confirm your email address before the account works.
• Staff accounts exist only by invitation. There is no open sign-up for staff.

What we collect

Your name and email address, and your phone number and country if you give them. What you enter about your business: its details, products, prices, costs, financial figures and your self-assessment answers.

We would like to know which parts of the platform people use, so we can tell whether the tools help. We do not collect that yet. When we do, we will say so here first and ask you to accept the new version of these terms.

Who can see it

Nobody sees your name, email address or phone number just because you created an account — not even StartHub’s own administrators.

• StartHub administrators see your business information — the company, its products, financial figures and assessments — but not who you are.
• The staff of a programme you apply to see your business information once you submit an application to it.
• Your name and contact details reach a programme only if its application form asks for them and you agree at that point.
• A mentor sees only the businesses assigned to them, while the assignment lasts.
• Other participants see nothing about you.

A draft application is private until you submit it. After you submit, changes you make are recorded and visible to that programme. We do not sell anything you enter, and we share it with no other organisation.

Business information on its own does not normally identify you, but we cannot promise it never could: in a small sector, a business can be recognisable.

Email we send you

Email about your account (confirming your address, resetting your password) and about applications you have made. We will not send announcements about new features or programmes until the legal review settles how to ask you first, and every one we do send will have a way to stop them. Email is sent on our behalf by an email provider, Resend.

Where it is kept, and how it is protected

Your information is held in a database hosted by Supabase, in Ireland. Access is enforced by the database itself, so one programme cannot read another programme’s participants. Staff actions on your records — decisions, moves between stages, exports — are logged. If your information is ever exposed, we tell the data protection authority, and you where we are required to.

How long we keep it

We keep your information for five years, and less where a law requires less. The five years run from the end of the last programme you took part in, or — if you never applied to one — from the last time you used the platform. After that, records a programme has to keep are made anonymous, and the rest is deleted.

The automatic clean-up that does this is still being built. Until it runs, ask us and we will remove your information sooner.

Who we are

StartHub Africa runs this platform. We are registered as a data controller with the data protection authority in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, and we follow each country’s data protection law.

What you can ask us to do

• See what we hold about you. Most of it is on your own screens; ask us for the rest, and we answer within 30 days.
• Correct it — you can edit your own information at any time.
• Delete your account. This is not built yet, and it will exist before the platform is used for real programmes. In the meantime, ask us and we will do it.
• Stop programmes seeing your business information. Today the only way to do that is to delete your account: sharing cannot be undone programme by programme.

What we ask of you

Enter information that is true and that you are entitled to share. Do not try to reach other people’s information or interfere with the platform. We may suspend an account that does.

What we do not promise

The break-even, unit-economics, planning and assessment tools work out figures from what you enter. They are not financial, legal or investment advice, and a programme’s decision is its own. A decision about your application is made by a person, not by software. We do not guarantee the platform is always available.

Changes to these terms

If we change these terms, you will be asked to accept the new version the next time you sign in. We record which version you accepted and when.