Terms of Service

These Terms of Service are the agreement between you and Yibuka (“Yibuka”, “we”, “us”) governing your use of yibuka.com and everything on it — the career library, the Quick Career Signal, study routes, opportunities, the money and life-skills lessons, and the premium reports.

You accept these terms by creating an account, taking an assessment, buying a report, or simply continuing to use the platform. If you do not accept them, please stop using Yibuka. If you are under 18, your parent or guardian accepts them alongside you when they confirm your account — section 5.

Two further documents form part of this agreement and are incorporated into it by reference:

• The Privacy Policy, which governs personal data.
• The Refund Policy, which governs money paid for reports.

Platform

The Yibuka website at yibuka.com, together with every account, assessment, report, lesson and service we make available through it.

Content

Everything we publish on the platform: career guides, study-route information, lessons, assessment questions, report text, images, code and design.

Free services

Everything on the platform that costs nothing: the career library, study routes, opportunities, financial-literacy and life-skills lessons, and the free career assessment.

Premium report

A paid, personalised assessment report unlocked by a one-time payment and delivered to your account.

User content

Anything you enter into the platform: profile details, assessment answers, and messages you send us.

Guardian

A parent or other adult with parental responsibility who confirms the account of a user under 18.

M-Pesa

The mobile money service operated by Safaricom PLC, through which all payments on the platform are made.

KES

Kenya Shillings, the currency of every price on the platform.

Reading without an account

The career library, study routes, opportunities and the money and life-skills lessons are open to anyone, with no account and no age check. Nothing in this section restricts reading them.

Holding an account

• Under 16: we do not offer accounts. The platform is written for older readers and we decline rather than serve a younger one. Explore the free guides with a parent instead.
• 16 to 17: you may create a student account, but it stays inactive until a parent or guardian confirms it. See section 5.
• 18 and over: you may create and use a student account without consent from anyone.
• Parent and guardian accounts are adult accounts and require you to be 18 or over.

Yibuka is designed for young Kenyans aged 16 to 26 and the adults who guide them. Anyone older is welcome to use it, but the content, the pathways and the pricing are built around that audience.

Where you are

The platform is built for Kenya: Kenyan institutions, Kenyan entry-level roles, Kenyan costs, 47 Kenyan counties, and M-Pesa as the payment rail. You may use it from anywhere, but the guidance assumes a Kenyan context and you are responsible for complying with the laws of wherever you are.

Honesty about your age

Giving a false age to escape the protections in section 5 is a breach of these terms. Where we have reason to believe an age is false, we may suspend the account until it is verified, and we will apply the protections owed to the real age.

Accurate information

Give us true information and keep it current. This is not a formality: guidance is calculated from your age, your county and your status, and a profile built on invented details produces advice for a person who does not exist.

Your credentials

Keep your password private and do not share your account. You are responsible for what happens under your account, unless it results from our own failure. Tell us at support@yibuka.com promptly if you believe someone else has access to it.

One account per person

Hold one account. Do not create accounts for other people, register under a name that is not yours, or open a new account to evade a suspension.

Closing your account

You may close your account at any time and for no stated reason, by writing to privacy@yibuka.com. Closure deletes your results permanently, including reports you have paid for — download anything you want to keep first. Section 16 explains the consequences in full.

Where the account holder is 16 or 17, an adult stands behind the account and these terms bind both of you.

How consent is obtained

1. At sign-up the young person names a parent or guardian, their relationship and their phone number.
2. The young person receives a private link and shares it with that adult.
3. The adult opens the link, reads what Yibuka is and what the account will hold, and confirms by typing their own name.

Until that confirmation, the account cannot save an assessment, store a result or buy a report, and no assessment answers or results are recorded. The free guides and lessons remain fully available in the meantime.

What the guardian is agreeing to

By confirming, the guardian states that they are the parent or guardian of the young person, that they are 18 or over, that they accept these terms and the Privacy Policy on the young person’s behalf, and that they consent to the processing described there.

Withdrawing consent

A guardian may withdraw consent at any time by writing to privacy@yibuka.com. The account is deactivated on receipt, and the guardian may also ask us to delete everything held on it.

Payments made by young people

Where a user under 18 buys a premium report, the guardian who confirmed the account is taken to have authorised the purchase. A guardian who has not authorised a particular payment should contact us under the Refund Policy, which deals with unauthorised transactions.

The platform’s commercial shape is deliberate and is part of what we are promising you.

Everything informational is free

The career library, study routes and institution guidance, the opportunities feed, the financial-literacy and life-skills lessons, and the free career assessment cost nothing and require no payment to access in full. There is no paywall on information.

What payment buys

Payment buys personal interpretation — a longer assessment, scored across more dimensions, written up as a report about you specifically. It never buys access to facts that are otherwise withheld.

How free access is funded

By institutions, employers and sponsors paying to be discovered on the platform. Sponsored content is always labelled as sponsored. Paying us buys visibility to an audience; it never buys access to that audience’s personal data, and it never buys a place in your assessment results. See section 14.

This is the most important section in this document, and the one we would ask you to read even if you read nothing else.

What Yibuka is

A decision-support tool. Assessments, career guides and reports are built to help you understand your strengths and preferences, see what pathways exist in Kenya and what they cost, and have a better-informed conversation about the choice in front of you.

What Yibuka is not

• Not a guarantee of admission to any school, college, university or programme.
• Not a guarantee of employment, of a job offer, of an internship, or of any particular income.
• Not a psychometric diagnosis. Our assessments are not clinical instruments, are not administered by a licensed psychologist, and say nothing about your intelligence or your mental health.
• Not professional advice. Nothing on the platform is legal, financial, investment, tax, medical or psychological advice. The financial-literacy lessons are education about how money works, not a recommendation to buy, sell or invest in anything.
• Not a verdict on you. A result describes patterns in what you told us on the day you told us. It does not define your ability, your worth or your future, and you are free to disagree with it.

Information changes

Course requirements, fees, deadlines, salary ranges and hiring conditions change, sometimes without notice. We work to keep Kenyan content current and correct, but we do not warrant that every figure is accurate at the moment you read it. Verify anything you are about to act on — a fee, a cut-off, a deadline, an application window — with the institution or employer directly.

Your decisions are yours

You decide what to study, where to apply, what to accept and what to pay for. Those decisions, and their consequences, remain yours. Section 18 sets out the limits of our liability.

What you are buying

A premium report is generated from your own answers to a longer assessment and delivered to your account immediately on payment. Each report states, before you pay, what it measures and what it includes.

Delivery and access

Reports are digital and are delivered to the account that paid for them. Access is permanent for as long as your account is open — there is no subscription and no expiry. Closing your account deletes your reports permanently, so download or print anything you want to keep.

Personal to you

A report describes one person. It is licensed for your own personal, non-commercial use and for sharing with the people helping you decide — your parents, a teacher, a mentor. It may not be resold, republished, distributed at scale, or used as content in another product. Section 13 sets out the licence in full.

Honest results

Reports are produced by fixed scoring rules applied to your answers. We do not tune a result toward a sponsor, weight it toward a paying institution, or alter it to be more flattering. A report that told you what you wanted to hear would be worthless.

Prices

All prices are in Kenya Shillings (KES) and are shown in full before you confirm a payment. There are no subscriptions, no recurring charges and no automatic renewals anywhere on the platform.

Prices shown on this page are current as at the effective date at the top of the document. The price that binds is the one displayed at checkout at the moment you confirm.

How payment works

1. You choose a report and enter the M-Pesa number to pay from.
2. We show the price in KES. Confirming sends an M-Pesa prompt to that handset.
3. You enter your M-Pesa PIN into Safaricom’s prompt — never into Yibuka, which never sees it.
4. Safaricom confirms the payment to us. We check that the amount received matches the price quoted, and the report unlocks — usually within seconds, occasionally within a few minutes.

Underpayment and mismatched amounts

If the amount received is less than the price quoted, the transaction is marked failed and the report does not unlock. Write to support@yibuka.com and we will resolve it under the Refund Policy.

Charges, taxes and network costs

• Any M-Pesa transaction charge is set and levied by Safaricom, not by us, and is separate from the price of the report.
• Prices are inclusive of any tax payable in Kenya at the applicable rate, unless stated otherwise at checkout.
• Your mobile data costs are your own.

Price changes

We may change prices at any time. A change never affects a payment already made, and never converts a free service into a paid one for content that was free when you relied on it.

Refunds are governed by the Refund Policy, which forms part of these terms and sets out the outcome for every payment scenario, how to claim, and how long each step takes.

The principle behind it, in one line:

Because reports are personalised and delivered immediately, a completed report is not refundable simply because you have changed your mind. That limitation does not affect your rights under the Consumer Protection Act, 2012 or any other Kenyan law, and it is not a licence for us to deliver something that does not work — the Refund Policy says what happens then.

You agree not to do any of the following.

Against the platform

• Scrape, crawl, harvest or bulk-download content by automated means, or attempt to extract the career library or assessment questions wholesale.
• Use the platform’s content to train, fine-tune or evaluate a machine learning model without our written permission.
• Probe, scan or test the security of the platform, or try to bypass authentication, payment, entitlement or rate-limiting controls.
• Interfere with the platform’s operation, overload it, or attempt to disrupt access for others.
• Reverse-engineer, decompile or attempt to derive our scoring rules, source code or underlying methods.
• Access an account, record or report that is not yours, including by guessing or reusing a guardian consent link.

Against other people

• Impersonate another person, or misrepresent your relationship to a young person in order to confirm or access their account.
• Harass, threaten, defame or abuse anyone, including our staff.
• Use the platform to recruit, solicit or target young people for any purpose we have not authorised.
• Submit content that is unlawful, obscene, hateful or that infringes someone else’s rights.

Commercially

• Resell, sublicense or commercially exploit reports, lessons or content from the platform.
• Republish substantial portions of our content, with or without attribution, as your own or as part of a competing product.
• Advertise, sell or promote anything through the platform without our written agreement.
• Use Yibuka to charge people for services we provide free, or to represent yourself as an agent, partner or affiliate of Yibuka when you are not.

It stays yours

Your profile details and assessment answers belong to you. We do not claim ownership of them and we do not sell them — see the Privacy Policy.

The permission you give us

You grant Yibuka a limited, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to store, process and display your content strictly in order to operate the platform for you: to score an assessment, generate and display your report, save your results and provide support. The licence exists only to run the service, lasts only as long as we hold the data, and ends when the content is deleted.

Aggregated and anonymised insight

We may produce aggregated statistics — for example, which career clusters are most common among users in a county — for research and to improve the platform. Aggregated data contains no personal data, cannot be traced back to you, and is never published in a form that could identify an individual.

What you promise us

That the content you submit is yours to submit, is accurate to the best of your knowledge, and does not infringe anyone else’s rights or break any law.

What we own

The platform and everything we publish on it — the career guides, study routes, lessons, assessment questions, scoring methods, report text and structure, software, design, layout, and the Yibuka name and logo — is owned by Yibuka or licensed to us, and is protected by copyright, trade mark and other laws.

What you may do

We grant you a personal, revocable, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to access and use the platform, and to read, download and print content for your own non-commercial use — including sharing your own report with your parents, a teacher or a mentor who is helping you decide.

What you may not do

• Copy, republish or distribute our content beyond that personal use.
• Remove or obscure any copyright notice, credit or watermark.
• Use the Yibuka name or logo without written permission.
• Create derivative works from our content, or use it to build a competing product.

Feedback

If you send us an idea or a suggestion, we may use it freely and without obligation to you. Please do not send us anything you consider confidential or want to be paid for.

If we have infringed your rights

Tell us at support@yibuka.com with enough detail to identify the material and your rights in it. We investigate promptly and remove infringing material where the complaint is made out.

Listings and links

The platform lists institutions, courses, employers, jobs, scholarships and events, and links to third-party websites. We take reasonable care in what we publish, but we do not control those third parties, do not endorse them by listing them, and cannot guarantee that a listing is current, complete or genuine.

Sponsored content

Some listings are paid placements. They are labelled as sponsored wherever they appear. Sponsorship buys visibility only — it does not affect your assessment results, does not change what a report says about you, and never gives a sponsor access to your personal data.

Dealing with a third party is your own affair

Any application, enrolment, purchase, contract or payment between you and a third party you found through Yibuka is strictly between you and them. We are not a party to it, we do not vet their terms, and we are not liable for their conduct or their failures.

We work to keep Yibuka available and fast, but we do not promise uninterrupted service and we do not offer an uptime guarantee. The platform may be unavailable for planned maintenance, for emergency repair, or because of something outside our control — a network outage, a provider failure, a power cut.

We may change the platform

Features may be added, changed or withdrawn as the product develops. Where we withdraw something material that you rely on, we will give reasonable notice. We will not withdraw access to a premium report you have already paid for while your account is open.

Beta and early features

Features labelled beta, preview or early access are provided as they are, may change substantially, and may be removed. Do not rely on them for a decision that matters.

By you

Stop using the platform at any time, or ask us to close your account under section 4. No reason is required and no fee applies.

By us

We may suspend or terminate an account where, acting reasonably, we believe that:

• these terms have been breached, in particular section 11;
• the account was created with false information, including a false age;
• the account is being used unlawfully, fraudulently, or to harm another user;
• a guardian has withdrawn consent for a user under 18; or
• we are required to do so by law.

Except where the breach is serious or the law prevents it, we will tell you what has happened and give you a fair chance to put it right. Where an account is terminated for a breach that was not your fault, we refund any premium report you paid for and could no longer use.

What termination means

• Access to the account, its results and its reports ends.
• Data is handled under the Privacy Policy — deleted on the schedule set out there, except records we must keep by law.
• Sections that by their nature should survive do survive: sections 12, 13, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22 and 24.

To the fullest extent permitted by Kenyan law, the platform is provided as it is and as available, and we exclude all warranties, conditions and terms implied by statute or common law that are not expressly set out in this agreement.

In particular, we do not warrant that:

• the platform will be uninterrupted, timely, secure or error-free;
• every piece of information — a fee, a cut-off, a salary range, a deadline — is accurate, complete or current at the moment you read it;
• an assessment result will match your own view of yourself, or the view of a teacher, employer or psychologist;
• using the platform will lead to admission, a job, an income or any other outcome;
• a third-party listing is genuine, current or offered by a legitimate organisation.

Subject always to the carve-outs in section 17, and to the fullest extent permitted by law:

What we are not liable for

• Indirect, incidental, special or consequential loss, however it arises.
• Loss of profit, revenue, opportunity, savings, goodwill or anticipated earnings.
• Decisions you make in reliance on the platform — a course chosen, an application not made, an offer declined — and their consequences.
• The acts, omissions, failures or fraud of a third party you found through the platform.
• Loss caused by your own breach of these terms, or by someone using your account because you shared your credentials.
• Interruptions caused by events outside our reasonable control, including network, power and provider failures.

The cap

Where we are liable to you, our total aggregate liability arising out of or in connection with this agreement is limited to the greater of:

1. the total amount you paid to Yibuka in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim; and
2. KES 1,000.

This reflects the nature of the service: Yibuka is a low-cost guidance tool, most of it free, and the cap is set against what you have actually paid us rather than against outcomes we never promised.

Your own responsibility

You are responsible for verifying anything you are about to act on, for the decisions you take, and for keeping your own copies of reports you want to retain.

You agree to indemnify Yibuka against claims, losses, liabilities and reasonable costs arising from your breach of these terms, your misuse of the platform, your infringement of a third party’s rights, or content you submitted that you were not entitled to submit. This does not apply to anything caused by our own breach or negligence, and we will tell you promptly of any claim, let you participate in its defence, and not settle it without your agreement.

How we handle personal data is set out in the Privacy Policy, which forms part of this agreement. It covers what we collect, our lawful basis for each use, who receives it, how long we keep it, the extra protections that apply to users under 18, and your rights under the Data Protection Act, 2019.

Nothing in these terms limits those rights, and nothing in these terms removes your right to complain to the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner.

Most problems are a misunderstanding or a mistake, and both are cheaper to fix by talking. This is the order we ask you to follow — it does not prevent you from going to court or to a regulator at any point.

1. Tell us. Write to support@yibuka.com setting out what happened and what you want done. We acknowledge within 7 days and aim to resolve within 30 days.
2. Escalate. If our answer does not satisfy you, say so and ask for the matter to be reviewed by someone more senior.
3. Negotiate in good faith. Both of us will make a genuine attempt to settle the dispute for 30 days from written notice of it.
4. Mediation. If that fails, either of us may propose mediation in Nairobi before a mediator agreed between us. Mediation is voluntary, and refusing it does not prejudice either party.
5. Courts. Failing all of the above, the courts of Kenya have jurisdiction — section 22.

Regulators

• Data protection matters: the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner. Details in the Privacy Policy.
• Consumer matters: the Competition Authority of Kenya, which handles consumer protection complaints.
• M-Pesa transaction matters: Safaricom PLC customer care, in the first instance, for a payment that failed on their side.

No class actions

Claims are brought individually and on your own behalf. This does not restrict any collective right conferred on you by Kenyan law.

This agreement, and any dispute or claim arising out of it or its subject matter — including non-contractual claims — is governed by the laws of Kenya. You and Yibuka submit to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of Kenya. If you are a consumer resident elsewhere, this does not deprive you of the protection of mandatory consumer laws in your own country.

We may update these terms as Yibuka grows, as the law changes, or as we add and retire features.

• The version number and effective date at the top of this page always show which version is current.
• For material changes — to pricing structure, liability, acceptable use or your rights — we give account holders at least 14 days’ notice by email or on-screen notice before they take effect.
• Minor changes — clarified wording, corrected typography, a new contact address — take effect when published.
• Changes never apply retrospectively to a payment already made or a report already delivered.

Continuing to use Yibuka after a change takes effect means you accept it. If you do not, close your account under section 4 — and if a material change disadvantages you within 14 days of buying a report, tell us and we will refund it.

Entire agreement

These terms, together with the Privacy Policy and the Refund Policy, are the whole agreement between you and Yibuka about the platform, and replace anything said before.

Severability

If any clause is found unenforceable, it is severed or read down to the minimum extent needed, and the rest of the agreement continues in force.

No waiver

If we do not enforce a right immediately, we have not given it up. A waiver counts only if it is in writing.

Assignment

You may not transfer your account or your rights under this agreement. We may assign ours to a successor entity, and will tell you if we do.

No partnership

Nothing here makes either of us the other’s agent, partner, employee or joint venturer.

Third parties

Nobody other than you and Yibuka may enforce this agreement, except a guardian acting for a user under 18.

Force majeure

Neither party is liable for a failure caused by an event outside its reasonable control, for as long as that event continues.

Notices

We give notice by email to the address on your account or by notice on the platform. You give notice by email to support@yibuka.com.

Language

These terms are written in English. A translation is provided for convenience only; the English text governs.

Headings

Headings and section numbers are for navigation and do not affect interpretation.

General and support

support@yibuka.com

Legal and IP notices

support@yibuka.com

Privacy and data rights

privacy@yibuka.com

A person reads what arrives at these addresses. Tell us what happened and what you would like done about it, and write from the email address on your account if you have one.