Cookie Policy

Kulea Hive is a nonprofit organisation registered as a company limited by guarantee with the National Investment Board of Sierra Leone, company registration number SL060326KULEA29231. Our registered office is at 6 Sanders Street, Freetown, Sierra Leone.

For general enquiries, please use the Contact page on this website. For questions specifically about cookies, privacy or data protection, please contact us at [PLACEHOLDER — confirm the data protection contact email].

Kulea Hive is the controller responsible for the browser storage described in this policy.

A cookie is a small text file that a website asks your browser to store on your device. When you return, the site can read that file to remember something about your previous visit. Similar technologies — including the browser features known as local storage and session storage — do much the same job: they let a site keep a small amount of information in your browser.

Local storage keeps information until it is cleared, so it can persist between visits. Session storage keeps information only for the current browsing session and is cleared when you close the tab or browser. This website uses these browser-storage features rather than traditional cookies, but the same consent principles apply, and for simplicity we refer to them all as cookies throughout this policy.

Some of this storage is strictly necessary for the site to work. The rest is optional and is used only if you choose to allow it.

We aim to comply with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the UK GDPR, and the EU ePrivacy rules that govern the use of cookies and similar storage.

The core ePrivacy principle is that we may store or read only strictly necessary items on your device without asking, and that anything beyond that requires your prior, informed consent. In practice this means we place no non-essential storage — including analytics — until you have actively agreed to it.

Consent must be a clear, affirmative choice. We do not use pre-ticked boxes, and simply continuing to browse or dismissing the banner does not count as consent.

When you first visit, a consent banner appears at the bottom of the page. It offers three clear choices: 'Accept all', 'Reject non-essential', and 'Manage preferences'. The banner does not block the page or trap your keyboard focus.

Choosing 'Manage preferences' opens the Privacy preferences dialog, where you can turn each optional category on or off individually and then choose 'Save preferences'. You can reopen this dialog at any time from the link in the site footer.

Until you make a choice, only essential storage is used. Analytics does not run, and no per-session analytics identifier is created, until you have granted analytics consent.

We group browser storage into four categories. Only the first is active without your consent; the other three stay switched off until you opt in, and each can be controlled separately.

The list below sets out every first-party item this website may store in your browser, the category it belongs to, where it is kept, what it does, and how long it lasts.

We do not set any advertising or marketing cookies, and we do not use cookies to track you across other websites or to build advertising or marketing profiles.

Our analytics is aggregate. It is designed to tell us how the site is used as a whole — not who you are. We do not store your IP address for analytics, we do not carry out cross-site tracking, and we do not use analytics to identify individuals.

Part of that measurement is our own, and part is provided by Vercel, the company that hosts this website. Vercel's analytics sets no cookies and stores nothing on your device. Like our own analytics, it does not run until you have granted Analytics consent.

When you have granted analytics consent, we record a small, privacy-conscious event as you use the site. These events are sent to our own endpoint and stored separately from any enquiry or subscription you send us.

The information recorded is aggregate and does not identify you. It includes the random per-session identifier described above, the page or route visited, the site or link you arrived from, your device type, browser and operating system, a coarse country derived on our server from a network signal (we do not store your IP address), your preferred language, your screen size, any campaign parameters in the link you followed, and the type of event — for example a page view, a form being started or submitted, a newsletter signup, a partner enquiry, or a contact enquiry.

The same consent also enables Vercel's measurement of this site. Vercel records a page view — the page address, and general details such as the type of device, browser and country — and standard web performance measurements, such as how quickly a page loaded and became usable. This is how we tell whether the site is fast enough for the connections our visitors actually use. Neither measurement is used to identify you, and neither runs on our internal admin pages.

For a fuller explanation of how we handle this and other data, please see our Privacy Policy. We keep analytics data for [PLACEHOLDER — define retention periods for enquiries, subscriptions and analytics].

You are in control of the optional categories and can change your mind at any time.

The website is fully usable whether or not you accept optional storage. All pages, navigation and forms work in exactly the same way.

If you reject non-essential storage, we keep only the essential kh-consent record that remembers your decision. No analytics identifier is created and no analytics events are collected, which means we cannot measure how the site is performing for you — but nothing you need in order to use the site is affected.

The browser storage itself stays on your device. The analytics events we generate ourselves after you consent are sent to our own endpoint and stored in a database hosted in the United Kingdom (London region, eu-west-2), provided by Supabase.

The page-view and performance measurements described above are processed by Vercel on their own platform, rather than being stored in our database.

We also rely on Google Workspace for staff email and on Vercel, our website hosting provider, to operate the site. Our primary data is hosted in the EU, but some providers may operate globally; where data is transferred outside the UK or EEA, appropriate safeguards apply [PLACEHOLDER — confirm transfer safeguards / SCCs].

Our Privacy Policy describes these providers and our data handling in more detail.

Under the UK and EU GDPR you have rights over your personal data, including the rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, objection and data portability, together with the right to withdraw consent at any time.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a data protection supervisory authority: [PLACEHOLDER — name the relevant supervisory authority/authorities].

Because our analytics is aggregate and is not linked to your identity, several of these rights apply mainly to the personal data described in our Privacy Policy rather than to analytics data. Please see the Privacy Policy for full details and for how to make a request.

We want everyone to be able to understand and control their privacy choices. This site targets WCAG 2.1 Level AA. The consent banner and the Privacy preferences dialog are built with semantic HTML and can be operated by keyboard, work with assistive technologies, show a visible focus indicator, use clearly labelled controls, and respect reduced-motion settings.

We may update this Cookie Policy from time to time to reflect changes to the site, to the storage we use, or to the law. When we make a material change — for example introducing a new category of storage — we will ask for your consent again before any new non-essential item is used.

The date shown at the top of this policy indicates when it was last updated. This policy is governed by [PLACEHOLDER — confirm governing law and jurisdiction].