Privacy Policy | Bonga Na Gava

1. Introduction

Bonga Na Gava is committed to protecting your privacy. As a SUSO participation tool designed to facilitate youth engagement in environmental policy, we recognize the importance of handling your personal information with care and transparency.

This Privacy Policy outlines how we collect, use, process, and protect your information when you access our website and utilize our public feedback collection systems to submit your views on biodiversity, climate change, and other governmental legislation.

2. What We Collect

We collect only what we need to validate and act on your input.

Information you give us: When you submit an opinion, apply to join us, opt in to SMS alerts, or contact us, we collect your name, your email address and/or phone number, and the contents of what you write. Opinion submissions also include the county or location you tell us, and the specific policy you are commenting on. Our Warriors application asks for more detail, including your county, organisation, and gender.
Where it is stored: Submissions are received by a Google Apps Script endpoint and written to a spreadsheet held in Google Sheets, a service operated by Google LLC. See section 6.
What we do not collect: We do not run advertising, we do not sell or trade your information to third party marketers, and we do not use tracking cookies. We operate no analytics or profiling tools on this site. We do not set advertising cookies and we do not share your data with advertising networks.
Automatic technical data: Like any web server, our host records standard request logs such as IP address, browser type and the page requested, in order to keep the site running and secure. These are not linked to your submissions and are not used to build a profile of you.

3. How We Use Your Data

Your input is the evidence behind our submissions, so the core purpose is advocacy:

Advocacy & Submission: To compile, verify, and formally submit your views to relevant government authorities regarding active bills and policies.
Community Engagement: To connect you with our WhatsApp community, invite you to workshops, and send campaign updates.
SMS Alerts: If you opt in to SMS alerts, we use your phone number to message you when a new bill or policy review opens for comment, and to send replies you have asked us for.
Platform Improvement: To improve our public feedback systems. We review submissions in aggregate and do not use them to make automated decisions about you.

4. Publication & Government Sharing

Please read this carefully, because it goes beyond what happens on most websites.

Your opinion is not published publicly at present. Opinions submitted through this site are held for internal review by our reviewers. They are not currently displayed on a public page, and this policy does not promise that they will be. We will tell you on this page if that changes.
If we publish opinions in future. Some opinions may be published on a public page, readable by anyone with the link, without logging in. We will announce that on this page before it happens. If you submitted before that point and do not want your opinion published, contact us using the details in section 11 and we will remove it and confirm that we have done so.
Names and contact details are withheld from reviewers unless needed. They are not part of the ordinary review view. Where they are needed for verification and compilation work, they are accessed only by authorised reviewers and not published alongside your opinion.
Your name may accompany government submissions. When we compile a submission to a government authority, your name can be included alongside the view you expressed, because a public participation submission carries more weight when citizens can be identified as its authors. We will tell you if we do this.
Where to withdraw. You can ask us at any time to remove your opinion, to stop your name being used in a government submission, or to delete your details. Contact us using the details in section 11.

5. Children & Young People

Bonga Na Gava is a youth platform and we expect that many people using it are young Kenyans. We take that seriously rather than ignoring it.

Under 18s: If you are under 18, please discuss any submission with a parent or guardian first, or contact us and we will help you take part in a way that is appropriate.
How we handle it: We do not knowingly seek or collect personal data from children under 13. We do not knowingly publish the personal details of anyone under 18.
Honest position: We are still formalising our consent process for under 18s. If you are under 18 and submit something, contact us and let us know, and we will either remove it or record the appropriate parental consent.

6. International Transfers

We want to be straightforward about something that many sites bury.

Our forms are hosted on Google infrastructure and your submissions are written to Google Sheets. That means your personal information is processed on servers operated by Google LLC, which is based in the United States, and is therefore transferred outside Kenya.

We make this transfer on the basis of the data protection safeguards Google publishes for its enterprise and cloud services, and we have assessed those safeguards as adequate for the limited purposes described in section 3. Your location information is treated with additional care for the same reason.

We do not transfer your information to any other third party for their own commercial use. If the position on international transfers changes, we will update this page and notify affected users.

7. Platforms & Channels

Bonga Na Gava operates as a web based portal. We have no standalone mobile application. All form-based submissions are made through this website.

We also operate an SMS channel on shortcode 21064. If you opt in via SMS, your phone number and any replies you send are handled separately from this website and are subject to the same purposes, retention, and your rights described here.

9. Security & Retention

We take reasonable technical and organisational measures to protect your personal data against unauthorised access, alteration, or destruction. This site is served over HTTPS with modern browser security headers in place, and access to unmasked personal details is restricted to authorised reviewers. However, no internet transmission is entirely secure, and we will not claim otherwise.

Retention: We keep your information for the duration of the policy review cycle it relates to, plus a defined period afterwards so that we can evidence the basis of a submission we made to government. Opinions and their associated personal details are reviewed at the close of each review cycle and personal details are then removed, while the anonymised opinion text may be retained for our public record. SMS opt-in records are kept while you remain subscribed, and for a period after you unsubscribe so we can honour your choice.

10. Your Rights

Under Kenya's Data Protection Act, you have the right to:

Be informed about how your personal data is used (this page).
Access the personal data we hold about you.
Correct inaccurate personal data.
Object to, or withdraw consent for processing based on consent.
Request deletion of your personal data, where we are not required to retain it.
Withdraw consent at any time, without affecting the lawfulness of processing before withdrawal.

To exercise any of these rights, contact us using the details in section 11. We aim to acknowledge requests within seven days and to resolve most requests within thirty days. We will tell you promptly if a request requires longer.

If you are not satisfied with our response, you may complain to the Office of the Data Commissioner of Kenya.

11. Contact Us

If you have any questions, concerns, or requests regarding this Privacy Policy or the handling of your personal data, please reach out to our team:

Email: submissions.BNG@suso.world | bonganagava@suso.world
Phone: +254 700 145257
Organization: World Leaders of Today