Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

CAMNEST-UK (the Cameroon-UK Diaspora Network of Engineering, Science and Technology) is a not-for-profit membership organisation with its registered office at Kemp House, Suite 4B, 128 City Road, London EC1V 2NX, United Kingdom. For the purposes of the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018, CAMNEST-UK is the data controller for the personal data described in this policy. You can contact us about anything in this policy at hello@camnest-uk.com.

2. Personal data we collect

We collect and process the following categories of personal data:

• Membership data — name, email address, phone number, discipline, university or employer, and the information you provide in your application, needed to administer your membership.
• Enquiry data — name, email address and the content of messages submitted through our contact form.
• Programme data — mentoring preferences, event registrations, and volunteering roles, used to run our programmes.
• Technical data — basic server logs (IP address, browser type, pages visited) generated when you browse this website.

We do not knowingly collect data from children under 16 and we do not collect special category data unless you volunteer it and it is necessary for a specific accessibility or safeguarding purpose.

3. How we use your data

We use personal data to process membership applications and administer memberships; to match and support mentoring pairs; to organise workshops, seminars and other events; to respond to enquiries; to send members organisational communications such as event notices and the annual impact report; and to meet our legal and governance obligations as a UK organisation.

4. Legal bases

Depending on the activity, we rely on: contract (administering your membership), legitimate interests (running a volunteer network, responding to enquiries, basic website security), consent (optional communications, which you can withdraw at any time), and legal obligation (accounting and governance records).

5. Sharing and transfers

We do not sell personal data, ever. We share data only with: volunteer committee members who need it to perform their roles; service providers that host our website, email and membership records under data processing agreements; and partner institutions where you have explicitly joined a programme that involves them (for example, a mentoring pair or a pilot scheme project board). Where data is transferred outside the UK — for example to a cloud provider — we ensure appropriate safeguards such as adequacy decisions or standard contractual clauses are in place.

6. Retention

Membership data is retained for the duration of your membership and for two years afterwards, after which it is deleted or anonymised. Enquiry data is deleted within twelve months of the enquiry being resolved. Financial records are retained for six years as required by UK law.

7. Your rights

Under UK GDPR you have the right to access your personal data, to have it corrected or erased, to restrict or object to its processing, to data portability, and to withdraw consent where processing is based on consent. To exercise any of these rights, email hello@camnest-uk.com. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) at ico.org.uk.

8. Cookies

This website does not set advertising or analytics cookies. Fonts are loaded from Google Fonts, which may log technical request data as described in Google's own privacy documentation.

9. Security

We apply proportionate technical and organisational measures to protect personal data, including access controls limiting data to the volunteers who need it, encrypted storage for membership records, and prompt review of any suspected incident. No system is perfectly secure, and we will notify affected individuals and the ICO of any breach where required by law.

10. Changes to this policy

We review this policy annually and whenever our processing changes materially. The date at the top of this page shows the current version. Significant changes will be announced to members by email.