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.

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 pseudonymised 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, community marketplace, 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).

4 Personal information stays with Wakamoso

Some questions in Wakamoso questionnaires collect what we call ‘Personal’ information — things like your name, your ID number, your exact home address, your precise location, your face photograph, your email, and similar identifying details. These Personal fields stay with Wakamoso. They are never shared with other organisations on the platform, even in anonymous form. 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. The Tenant will see all the answers you provide in a survey and can link it to your name if they already have your contact details (for example, you are in their customer or employee user groups). You can engage with or ignore any individual survey invitation; doing so does not change your Opt-In. 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. 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.

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. FuseIT provides our technical support. Meta (WhatsApp Business) delivers our messages on WhatsApp. AWS handles your Wallet. 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

You’ll always receive messages from us about your account and about surveys you have already agreed to take part in — these are part of the service you signed up for, and you can’t opt out of them while your account is active. We may also send you marketing messages about other Wakamoso opportunities. These are covered by this Opt-In. You can opt out of marketing at any time without affecting your service messages.

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. By giving us their details, you confirm that you have their permission to share their information with us.

11 The Wakamoso operating envelope

Wakamoso operates a community data platform with the following categories of processing. Any specific use within these categories is covered by your Opt-In, and 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 new category of processing outside this envelope requires a new version of this Opt-In, which is then offered to you for fresh acceptance.

(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 are a participant 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.

(c) Platform services to you. Your Wakamoso Wallet, your CV, your profile, community marketplace, 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. The tenant receives every answer you provide in a questionnaire including any personal fields.

(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 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.

This Opt-In covers all Tenants’ roles 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, eligibility decisions, and similar. You have the right under POPIA Section 71 to ask for a human reviewer to look at any automated decision that materially affects your rights or your access to a Wakamoso service. No automated decision excludes you from a Wakamoso service you are otherwise entitled to without a human reviewer being available to consider your case. 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 out of South Africa except in the limited cases permitted by POPIA Section 72. Where a Tenant questionnaire involves a cross-border element, the Ethics Review Office documents the lawful basis on the survey’s Ethics Approval Record before it is sent to you. Aggregated and anonymised community insights may be published or shared internationally; these do not identify you.

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. This removes your Wakamoso profile and the personal information for which Wakamoso Africa is the Responsible Party, including any location you have shared with us. Deletion removes you from any forward-going longitudinal series (point 11(b)); aggregated outputs already published under the Data Publication Policy thresholds are not affected because they no longer link to you.

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.