Privacy Policy

Schoolmate.ng ("Schoolmate", "we") provides the software each registered school uses to manage its own students, staff, attendance, grades and fees. For student and guardian data, your school is the data controller — it decides what to collect and why — and Schoolmate acts as a data processor, handling that data only on the school's instructions, as expressed through how the school uses the platform.

On behalf of a school, Schoolmate stores:

• Student records: name, admission number, date of birth, gender, class, guardian contact details
• Attendance records
• Continuous assessment and exam scores
• Fee invoices and payment status (card/bank details themselves are handled by Paystack — we never see or store them)
• Staff accounts: name, email, phone, role
• Messages sent to SchoolmateAI, the in-app assistant

Much of the data on Schoolmate concerns students who are minors. It is collected and processed solely for the school's legitimate educational administration — never for advertising, profiling, or any purpose unrelated to running the school — and only for as long as the school retains it.

Schoolmate uses the following subprocessors, only for the purposes stated:

• Paystack — payment processing for fee collection and subscription billing
• Termii — SMS delivery (e.g. attendance and payment alerts to guardians)
• ZeptoMail — transactional email delivery
• Groq — processes messages sent to SchoolmateAI to generate responses
• Neon — our database host

Some of these providers may process data outside Nigeria.

Data is retained for as long as the school's account is active, plus a reasonable period after cancellation to allow recovery, unless the school requests earlier deletion or the law requires longer retention.

If you're a parent, guardian, student or staff member and want to access, correct, or request deletion of your data, contact your school directly — as the data controller, they're best placed to action this and are responsible for it under the Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023. Schoolmate will support the school in fulfilling that request.

Passwords are hashed, not stored in plain text. Data is scoped per school and inaccessible to other schools on the platform. Access to the platform requires authentication, and administrative actions are logged.

We'll update this page when our practices change and update the date at the top.

Questions about this policy: privacy@schoolmate.feuxlabs.com.ng (placeholder — update before launch).