Wakamoso POPIA Opt-In

1 Who we are

Wakamoso Africa (Pty) Ltd is a South African research and data company. We are registered with the South African Information Regulator under POPIA Registration Number 2026-018959. Our Information Officer is the CEO, Mélani Prinsloo. You can reach us at info@wakamoso.africa, by post at 14 King Street, Irene, Centurion 0062, or by reading our full Privacy Policy at https://wakamoso.africa/privacy-policy.

2 What we collect from you

We collect your mobile number — which is how we contact you and how we keep your account unique on the platform. We collect any answers you choose to give us in any questionnaire on Wakamoso. If you share your location with us, we collect the coordinates your device sends — see point 4. Some questionnaires may also ask for your name, address, ID number, photograph, email, or other personal details. Any field marked ‘Personal’ is given extra protection — see point 4 below.

Your mobile number and your acceptance of this Opt-In are what we need to open your account. Everything else is voluntary. To receive survey invitations matched to you, complete your Wakamoso User Profile in the app (age, gender, language, area); you can update or clear it at any time.

3 What we use it for

We use your information to: maintain your account on Wakamoso; invite you to surveys you may want to take part in; pay rewards to your Wakamoso Wallet for surveys you complete; match you to opportunities, services, and Tenant invitations near you; generate aggregated community insights at geographic levels appropriate to the data, subject to the publication thresholds in the Wakamoso Data Publication Policy; provide the platform features you choose to use (your profile, your Wallet, your CV, incident reporting, programme participation, and so on); measure change over time in the communities and programmes you participate in (see point 11); and improve and develop Wakamoso. The full set of categories of use that this Opt-In covers is set out in point 11 (the Wakamoso operating envelope). This Opt-In covers processing for which POPIA requires or permits consent; other Wakamoso processing may be carried out on another lawful basis permitted by POPIA.

4 How your Personal information is handled

‘Personal’ information means identifying details such as your name, ID number, home address, precise location, face photograph, email address and similar. Personal information in your Wakamoso account or User Profile stays with Wakamoso and is not disclosed to Tenants. If you voluntarily enter Personal information as an answer to a Tenant’s questionnaire, that information is provided to that Tenant as part of your survey response — the questionnaire will tell you when this is the case (see point 5).

Your precise location is used internally to match you to nearby opportunities and to show you your own location in the app. Visualisations, reports and exports show your location only at an approximate level (around 1 km cell), so an individual is not identifiable from a published map or table. Some Wakamoso features apply your location for additional purposes, including listing a business or service publicly and providing a delivery address to a service provider. These uses are governed by this single Opt-In; Wakamoso does not ask for an additional consent at the point of action. Whether your location is applied to those purposes is determined by whether you choose to use those features. Wakamoso does not collect your location in the background: we do not record where you open the app, do not store a timeline of your locations, do not analyse your movement, and do not run live tracking. Location is captured only when you actively share it.

5 Tenant surveys

Other organisations (Tenants) can run surveys on Wakamoso, after our Ethics Review Office has reviewed them in accordance with the Wakamoso Ethics Framework.

Who is responsible for your information. Wakamoso is the Responsible Party for information it collects and processes for Wakamoso’s own purposes. Where a Tenant collects information through its own questionnaire, that Tenant may be the Responsible Party for that information. Each questionnaire identifies the Responsible Party and how you can exercise your rights in relation to that information.

The Tenant receives your answers to their survey, including any Personal information you enter as an answer. If you are already the Tenant’s customer or employee, they will know it is you; otherwise Wakamoso does not share your mobile number or account identity with them, so they see your answers but not who you are. You choose whether to take part each time. Tenants fall into recognised categories: commercial organisations, academic and research institutions, government and municipal bodies, civil-society organisations and NGOs, programmes and impact initiatives, and Wakamoso itself acting as a Tenant for its own research. Any Tenant in these categories is covered by this Opt-In; we do not need to ask you again each time we onboard a new Tenant within these categories.

6 Pseudonymous targeting across Tenants

If you fill in a Wakamoso questionnaire — for example, your profile — Tenants on the platform can use your non-Personal answers as pseudonymous targeting criteria (your responses are matched on demographic and profile fields, not by name) to invite you to their own surveys. For example: a Tenant could ask Wakamoso to invite people who have said they speak Zulu and live in Mamelodi to take part in a survey. Tenants may also define location-based criteria for invitations — for example, ‘people within 5 km of our business’. Wakamoso evaluates the criteria, and the Tenant receives the invitation outcome rather than your coordinates. The Tenant doesn’t see who you are — they just define who they want to invite, and Wakamoso decides whether to send the invitation to you. Your Personal-tagged fields (name, ID, address, precise location, face, and similar) are never used this way.

7 Sensitive topics

Some surveys may ask about your health, food security, safety, religion, or other sensitive topics — these get extra protection under POPIA (Special Personal Information). You are not required to disclose sensitive information: each such question includes an explicit answer option such as ‘I would prefer not to say’ or ‘Other’ (with an optional follow-up where you can elaborate or decline in your own words). Your reward is not affected if you choose this option. Every sensitive question has its purpose disclosed at the point of asking. Where a questionnaire collects Special Personal Information, Wakamoso or the relevant Tenant will ensure that the processing has a lawful basis under POPIA, including consent where required.

8 Other parties that help us run the platform

We use trusted partners to run Wakamoso. Amazon Web Services (Cape Town region) hosts the platform and your data. Meta (WhatsApp Business) delivers our messages on WhatsApp. Freepaid (Pty) Limited redeems your Wakamoso Wallet rewards as airtime or data to your registered mobile number. Each of these partners is contractually required to protect your information and to use it only for the purposes Wakamoso agrees with them. They cannot use your information for their own purposes.

9 Service messages and marketing

Essential account and service messages — about your account and about surveys you have already agreed to take part in — are necessary to operate your Wakamoso account and cannot be disabled while your account remains active. You can stop using the service or delete your account in accordance with point 15. Marketing messages about other Wakamoso opportunities are separate, and you can opt in or opt out of them at any time without affecting your essential service messages. By default, marketing is off; you must specifically choose to receive marketing.

10 People you tell us about

If you give us the contact details of other people — referees who can confirm something about you, friends you’d like us to invite to a survey — we will only contact them for the reason you have given. Our first message to them will tell them that you suggested they be contacted, and how to opt out. Only provide another person’s contact details where you are permitted to do so.

11 The Wakamoso operating envelope

Wakamoso operates a community data platform with the following categories of processing. This Opt-In establishes the categories of processing you agree to. Each questionnaire will still tell you what information it asks for, why it is being collected, who the Responsible Party is, and any material use or disclosure specific to that questionnaire. We will not ask you to accept the Opt-In again each time we run a new survey, onboard a new Tenant within the recognised Tenant categories, or launch a new service within these categories. A material new purpose or category of processing that is not reasonably described by this operating envelope requires a revised Opt-In and, where required by POPIA, fresh consent.

(a) Cross-sectional community baselines and surveys. We invite community members to take part in surveys that measure conditions, wellbeing, and capability across an area. The Wakamoso Community Capability and Conditions Baseline Instrument is one of these.

(b) Programme impact measurement and longitudinal tracking. Where you have enrolled in a programme run by a Tenant, or where you are part of a community that a Tenant or Wakamoso is measuring change in over time, we may invite you to repeat the same or similar questions periodically so that change can be measured. Your answers across rounds are linked using a pseudonymous identifier. The linkage is handled by the platform’s matching engine; Wakamoso staff do not see your individual trajectory. Outputs from longitudinal measurement are aggregated and respect the publication thresholds in point 4 and in the Wakamoso Data Publication Policy. If you would prefer not to be invited to repeat measures, you can opt out at any time (see point 15).

(c) Platform services to you. Your Wakamoso Wallet, your CV, your profile, incident reporting, your participation in programmes, and the Wakamoso mobile application and its services. These are services we provide directly to you.

(d) Tenant-commissioned questionnaires. Surveys commissioned by other organisations across the recognised Tenant categories listed in point 5. Each Tenant questionnaire is reviewed by our Ethics Review Office under the Wakamoso Ethics Framework before it reaches you.

(e) Cohort matching and invitations. We use your non-Personal answers as pseudonymous targeting criteria to decide whether to invite you to a particular survey, programme, opportunity, or service (see point 6).

(f) Automated platform routing. We use automated rules to route you to welfare referrals when your answers indicate need; to decide whether a community sample is already sufficient for the question being asked and you do not need to be invited again; to match you to opportunities and Tenant services; and to determine eligibility for programmes and platform features (see point 12).

(g) Aggregated insight production and publication. We produce community-level insights from anonymised, aggregated data and publish or share them with Tenants, partners, and the public. Publication respects the thresholds in the Wakamoso Data Publication Policy so an individual cannot be identified from a published output.

Enrolling in a Tenant’s programme is a separate step you take with that Tenant. This Opt-In covers Wakamoso’s role in inviting you, linking your answers across rounds, and producing aggregated outputs.

12 How automated decisions work

Wakamoso uses automated rules in the categories listed in point 11 — cohort matching, welfare routing, sample sufficiency checks, eligibility decisions, and similar. Where POPIA Section 71 applies, you have the statutory rights it provides in relation to automated decision-making that has legal consequences for you or affects you to a substantial degree. Wakamoso also provides human review for automated decisions that materially affect your access to a Wakamoso service, even where Section 71 may not apply. You can request human review by emailing info@wakamoso.africa or through the Wakamoso mobile application.

13 What we do not do with your data

We do not use your answers to train general-purpose artificial intelligence models. Your data is used for community insight, cohort matching, and the services described in point 11. It is not used as training data for AI systems outside the Wakamoso platform. If our position on this changes, that is a new category of processing and we will publish a new version of this Opt-In for your acceptance.

We do not transfer your Personal information outside South Africa other than as permitted by POPIA Section 72. Where such a transfer is required, we will tell you about the transfer, the information involved and the recipient. Aggregated and anonymised community insights may be published or shared internationally; these do not identify you.

We do not send you direct marketing unless you specifically opt in to receive it (point 9).

We do not collect your location in the background (point 4).

We do not sell your Personal information to any third party.

14 Your rights

Under POPIA, you have the right to: see what information we hold about you, correct it, delete it, object to your information being used for marketing or any other specific purpose, withdraw your consent at any time, request human review of an automated decision that materially affects you (point 12), be notified if Wakamoso suffers a personal-information compromise that creates a reasonable risk of harm to you (POPIA Section 22), and lodge a complaint with the South African Information Regulator at https://inforegulator.org.za. You can exercise any of these rights from inside the Wakamoso app, or by emailing info@wakamoso.africa. We respond to all requests within 30 days.

15 Opting out and deleting

Every WhatsApp survey we push to you includes an OPT OUT option. Choosing OPT OUT stops further outbound Wakamoso WhatsApp survey invitations to your number, applied platform-wide. Reasonable processing for compliance, safety, and record-keeping continues as required by law. Opt-out is one-way for now — you cannot opt back in by replying again; if you change your mind, email info@wakamoso.africa.

In the Wakamoso mobile app, you can turn off notifications at any time from the app settings.

You can DELETE your Wakamoso account from inside the Wakamoso app. Your Wallet must be at zero first — redeem your balance through Freepaid before you delete. Deletion removes the personal information Wakamoso holds as the Responsible Party: your profile, your User Profile, the Personal fields you gave when setting up your account, and the link between you and your survey answers. Personal information you gave inside a Tenant’s own survey, where the Tenant is the Responsible Party, is not removed — see below. Deletion completes within 30 days; backup copies cycle out within 90 days. Wallet transactions (seven-year tax retention) and your opt-out record are kept without your identifiers.

We retain personal information only for as long as reasonably necessary for the purposes described in this Opt-In, unless a longer retention period is required or permitted by law. Our Privacy Policy and Retention Schedule set out the applicable retention periods for different categories of information.

Some surveys on the platform are conducted by other organisations. Where those organisations collected personal information directly through their own questionnaires, they may be separate Responsible Parties under POPIA. Deleting your Wakamoso account does not automatically delete the records they hold. Requests relating to those records must be directed to the relevant organisation.

Anonymous contributions you have already made to community insights remain (they no longer link back to you). The full details are in our Privacy Policy at https://wakamoso.africa/privacy-policy.