Your group makes the rules. We keep the record.

These Terms of Service ("Terms") are an agreement between you and Nanatec Limited, a company incorporated in Kenya with its registered office at Kasarani Mwiki Road, P.O. Box 38001–00100, Nairobi, Kenya ("we", "us", "our"). They govern your use of the Chama app, website and related services (together, the "Platform").

By registering, or by continuing to use the Platform, you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, do not use the Platform.

Please read section 4 (what the Platform is and is not), section 13 (disputes and losses) and section 19 (liability) carefully. They describe important limits on what we do and what we are responsible for.

Group

A set of members who use the Platform together, either as a social group or a savings group.

Savings group

A group that handles money. It runs either as a pooled-savings group (members contribute to a shared pool and borrow from it) or a rotating-payout group (the whole pot goes to one member each round, in turn).

Group rules

The settings a group chooses — contribution amounts and schedule, loan limits, interest rate and method, guarantor requirements, penalties, payout order, exit rule, and who approves what.

Official

A member holding a group role — chairperson or group admin, treasurer, or secretary.

Cycle

A bounded round of a savings group's activity, from opening to closing.

Ledger

The permanent, append-only record of every confirmed money movement in a group.

Declared payment

A payment you tell the group you have already made, which an official must verify before it becomes a ledger entry.

Mobile money

A mobile payment service such as M-Pesa, used to move funds in and out.

You may use the Platform only if you are at least 18 years old and legally able to enter into a binding agreement where you live.

Your identity on the Platform is your verified phone number. We do not collect national identity numbers, passports or other identity documents, and we do not verify who you are beyond confirming that you control the phone number you registered. Groups are formed by people who already know and trust one another; that trust, not an identity check by us, is what makes a group work.

You are responsible for:

• keeping your PIN, device and phone number secure;
• everything done through your account, whether or not you did it;
• telling us promptly at info@chama.ke or +254 759 530195 if you lose your phone or believe someone else is using your account.

You may belong to more than one group. Your role in one group has no effect on your standing in another, and members of one group cannot see anything about your other groups.

The Platform is a record-keeping and coordination tool. It gives your group a shared, tamper-resistant record of what everyone has contributed, borrowed and repaid, and it carries out the instructions your group gives it.

We are not a bank, a lender, a savings institution, an insurer, a guarantor, an escrow agent, or a financial adviser. We do not:

• lend you money, or lend your group money;
• take deposits, or pay interest on anything;
• guarantee any loan, contribution, payout or share-out;
• decide who may borrow, how much, at what rate, or on what terms;
• collect debts, pursue defaulters, or report anyone to a credit bureau;
• vouch for any member's honesty, solvency or intentions;
• advise you on whether any group, loan or arrangement is a good idea for you.

Money in a savings group is lent by members to members. The agreement is between you and your group, on your group's own terms. We are not a party to it. We record it.

Nothing on the Platform is financial, legal or tax advice.

The rules of a group are set by the group, not by us. Within the limits the Platform enforces, your group chooses its contribution amounts and schedule, its loan limits and interest, whether guarantors are required, its penalties, its payout order, how it shares out, and what happens when someone leaves.

The Platform enforces some rules mechanically once your group has set them — for example, it will refuse a loan request above the group’s chosen multiple of the member’s savings, and it will not let a group open a second cycle while one is still open. These are guardrails, not a judgement that a rule is fair, lawful or wise. Choosing the rules is your group’s responsibility, and living with them is too.

Group rules can change. Changes made in the ways the group allows apply going forward. Terms already locked onto an existing loan — its interest rate and method — stay as they were when the loan was made.

The person who creates a group is its first admin and holds that office until the group holds an election.

Roles are per-group and are checked every time an action is taken, so a change of office takes effect immediately.

Officials have real power over your money and your record. Depending on the role, an official can:

• change the group's rules and settings;
• invite members, approve join requests, and remove members;
• approve or reject a payment you have declared;
• record contributions and repayments on your behalf;
• approve, reject and disburse loans;
• post an adjusting entry to correct the ledger;
• open and close cycles, set the payout order, and disburse payouts and share-outs.

Actions that move money require the official to re-authenticate first, and the ledger entry that results is permanent. But the Platform cannot tell an honest instruction from a dishonest one. Choose your officials carefully. If an official acts against the group's interests, that is a matter between them and the group; see section 13.

Groups that handle money may hold elections for chairperson, treasurer and secretary. Elections are opened by a current chairperson or group admin. Each member has one vote per office. Voting is open: while voting is under way, the running tally is visible to the whole group. The candidate with the most votes wins; a tie is settled by a draw. Roles are reassigned automatically when the election closes, and the full election history stays in the group’s record. Terms of office default to twelve months.

Social groups have no offices and no elections.

Money reaches a group in three ways:

• Mobile money. You approve a payment on your phone and the provider confirms it to us directly. No human review is involved.
• An official records it. A treasurer records a cash or offline payment they have received. It is confirmed at once, because the official entering it is the one accepting the money.
• You declare it, an official verifies it. See section 8.

Payouts and loan disbursements go out by mobile money to your registered number, or are handed over offline and recorded. Share-outs at the close of a cycle are recorded rather than sent automatically.

Where the money physically sits. Funds moved by mobile money pass through a mobile-money account. Depending on how your group is set up, that is either the group's own account or an account we operate solely to route funds between members and their destination. Where funds pass through an account we operate, they pass through in transit only: we hold them for no purpose other than completing the movement your group's rules call for, we claim no beneficial interest in them, we pay no interest on them, and they are never treated as a deposit with us or as our money.

Mobile money is not ours. Mobile-money services are operated by third parties under their own terms. Delays, failures, reversals, outages, limits and charges imposed by a mobile-money provider are outside our control. We do not guarantee that any transfer will succeed, or succeed at a particular time.

Rounding. Mobile money transacts only in whole units of currency. Where an amount cannot be transacted exactly, the Platform rejects it rather than silently rounding it. You will be asked for an amount that can be sent exactly.

We charge groups nothing. The Platform is free to use. Any fee or penalty you see in your ledger is one your own group has set and charged — not a charge by us. Your mobile-money provider and your mobile network may charge you their own fees; those are yours to pay.

If you pay outside the app — cash to the treasurer, a bank transfer, a mobile-money payment made directly — you can declare it: the amount, how you paid, the reference, the date, and optionally a photo of the receipt.

A declaration is not money. It is a claim that you have paid. Until an official approves it, it does not appear in the ledger, it does not count towards your contributions, it does not reduce your loan, and it is shown separately from the group's pool balance.

When an official approves your declaration, the ledger entry is posted for exactly the amount you declared. An official cannot edit your figure. If it is wrong, they must reject it with a reason and you can correct it and submit again — so the record never contains a reviewer's rewrite of what you said.

You may only declare payments you made yourself. You may cancel your own declaration until someone has reviewed it. The same reference cannot be pending twice for the same payment method in a group.

In a pooled-savings group, members borrow from the pool their group has built.

• How much you can borrow is capped at a multiple of your own savings, set by your group. The Platform refuses requests above that cap.
• Who approves is set by your group — officials, or a vote of enough members.
• Interest is charged at the rate and by the method your group has chosen. The two methods cost very different amounts: under flat interest you pay interest on the whole original amount for the whole term; under reducing balance you pay interest only on what you still owe. At the same nominal rate, flat costs roughly twice as much. The method that applies is shown on every quote and every repayment schedule — read it before you accept.
• Guarantors, if your group requires them, must accept before the loan is paid out. If you guarantee someone’s loan and they default, your group can hold you liable for it under its own rules. Do not guarantee a loan you cannot afford to repay yourself.
• Late payment may attract a penalty if your group has set one. It is posted to the ledger and goes back into the pool.
• The rate and method are fixed onto your loan when it is made. Later changes to your group’s settings do not change an existing loan.

If you do not repay, the Platform records the loan as overdue, and your group may mark it defaulted or written off. It applies the penalties your group has set and blocks you from leaving the group with the loan outstanding, where your group uses that rule. That is the whole of what the Platform does. We do not chase you, and we do not chase anyone on your behalf. Recovering the money is your group's job, under its own rules and whatever legal rights it has.

In a rotating-payout group, everyone contributes the same amount each round and the whole pot goes to one member, until everyone has received once, and then it begins again.

The order is either a list your group agrees or a random draw at the start of the round, as your group chooses. The order is visible to every member once it is set.

Receiving early is, in substance, being lent the others' contributions. A member who receives their turn and then stops contributing leaves the rest of the group short. The Platform records who has received and who has not; it cannot make anyone keep paying.

A savings group runs in cycles. Only one cycle can be open at a time; the chairperson closes one before opening the next.

Closing a pooled-savings cycle produces a statement — what was contributed, what interest was earned, what loans are still outstanding — and, if the group shares out, a distribution. Outstanding loans, penalties and losses are accounted for before anything is distributed. The default is pro-rata: you get your own contributions back plus a share of the interest in proportion to what you contributed. A group may instead choose to split the interest equally. Your share is itemised on the closing statement.

Leaving a group. You may leave, and officials may remove you, subject to your group's exit rule. The default is settle first: you must clear any outstanding loan before you can leave, and your savings are returned at the close of the cycle rather than immediately, so that one departure does not drain the pool mid-cycle. A group may adopt a different rule. Either way, the exit and its settlement are recorded in the ledger.

Leaving a group does not erase your history in it. Your membership is marked as ended; the ledger entries remain (section 12).

Every confirmed money movement — contributions in, loans out, repayments in, payouts out, penalties, fees — becomes an entry in an append-only ledger. Once an entry is posted, the Platform provides no way for anyone — you, your officials, or our own staff — to edit or delete it.

Corrections are made by adding, not by erasing. A mistake is fixed with a new adjusting entry, posted by a treasurer, so the history stays complete and the correction is visible alongside what it corrects.

Balances are always worked out from the ledger. Nothing is stored as a figure someone can change.

Every member of a group can see that group's full ledger, including what other members contributed, borrowed and repaid. Joining a group means accepting that your financial activity in that group is visible to the other members of it. Members of other groups see none of it.

Actions taken by our own staff are recorded in a separate permanent audit record.

This section describes what we do and, more importantly, what we do not do.

A failed, delayed or duplicated mobile-money transfer. Mobile-money providers tell us what happened. We record each provider confirmation once, so the same confirmation cannot post twice, and repeating an action that did not appear to complete will not charge you twice. If money left your account but no confirmation reached us, raise it with your mobile-money provider first — they hold the authoritative record — and tell your treasurer, who can record the payment once it is confirmed. We cannot reverse a mobile-money transfer, and we cannot recover money from a provider on your behalf.

A wrongly approved or wrongly rejected declaration. An approval posts what was declared. If it should not have been approved, the group's treasurer posts an adjusting entry. We do not adjudicate whether a declaration was honest.

A borrower who does not repay. See section 9. The loss falls on the group — and, if your group uses guarantors, on the guarantors.

An official who misuses their position — approving false payments, disbursing to themselves, changing rules to their own advantage. Every money movement they cause is recorded permanently in the ledger and cannot be edited afterwards, which is usually enough for a group to see what happened. Beyond keeping that record, we do not intervene in a group's internal affairs. The group's remedies are its own rules, an election, and whatever legal rights its members have.

Between members. Disagreements about contributions, loans, payouts, share-outs or conduct are resolved by the group under the group's own rules. We are not a party to them, we do not arbitrate them, and we are not liable for the outcome. We may, at our discretion, provide a copy of the relevant records where a court or lawful authority requires it.

When we will act. We may suspend an account or a group where we reasonably believe the Platform is being used for fraud or unlawful activity (section 17). That is a protective step, not a determination of any dispute, and it is not a promise to detect wrongdoing.

The Platform is free because financial institutions — banks, SACCOs, insurers and fintechs — pay to show offers on it.

How ads are shown. In three places only: a labelled banner on your dashboard, a sponsored card in your activity feed, and a financial-products section you can choose to visit. Ads are always labelled as sponsored, and never appear inside a flow where money is moving, so a sponsored offer can never be mistaken for something your group is asking you to do.

How ads are targeted. By coarse, group-level context only — the type of group and the region. Never by your transactions, your balances, your loans or your repayment behaviour. The part of the system that serves ads reads advertising records only; it does not read your group’s financial records.

What advertisers get. Counts of how often an ad was seen and clicked, identified by a one-way pseudonymous reference that cannot be turned back into you. Advertisers do not receive your phone number, your name, your group's records or any financial information about you.

We do not sell member data. Not to advertisers, not to anyone.

Your control. You can reduce how often ads appear, or opt out of personalised ad placement, in your profile settings. Ads fund the Platform, so opting out limits their volume and relevance rather than removing them entirely.

Offers are not our offers. Anything an advertiser promotes is theirs, on their terms, under their regulation. We do not endorse it, we have not assessed whether it suits you, and any dealing you have with an advertiser is between you and them.

Being in a group means being told what is happening in it. We send you:

• In-app notifications — always.
• Push notifications — if you install the app and allow them. You can turn them off in your device settings.
• SMS — for important group and money events, and as the fallback when we cannot reach you by push.

These messages are part of the service, not marketing. Turning off SMS entirely would mean missing that a loan needs your approval or that a payment is overdue, so SMS for group and transaction events cannot be switched off while you are a member of a group. Leaving the group ends them.

We do not email members. Email is used only for our own staff.

Your network’s charges are yours. Receiving SMS, using data and using mobile money may cost you money under your own tariff. We do not reimburse it.

Invitations. When a member invites someone to a group, we send that person one SMS containing the invitation code and a link. If you receive an invitation you did not expect, ignore it — the code lapses after 30 days and you are never enrolled in anything by receiving a message. The member who sent it is responsible for having a good reason to have your number.

You agree not to:

• use the Platform for anything unlawful, including fraud, money laundering, or handling the proceeds of crime;
• misrepresent a contribution, a loan, a repayment, a receipt or your identity;
• declare a payment you did not make, or approve one you know was not made;
• use the Platform to run an investment scheme, a pyramid or a Ponzi arrangement, or to solicit money from people who are not genuinely known to the group;
• register on behalf of someone else, or use a phone number you do not control;
• attempt to reach any account, group or record you are not a member of;
• probe, scrape, overload, reverse-engineer or interfere with the Platform or the infrastructure it runs on;
• resell, sublicense or commercially exploit the Platform.

The Platform is licensed to you for your personal use in your groups. We keep all rights in it, including its name, design and software. The content you and your group put into it stays yours; you grant us only the permission we need to store, process and display it in order to run the service.

You may stop at any time. Leave your groups (section 11) and stop using the Platform. You may ask us to close your account; we will do so once you have no outstanding obligations in any group. Closing your account does not remove your group’s ledger entries — see sections 12 and 18.

We may suspend or restrict an account or a group where we reasonably believe there is fraud or unlawful activity, a serious breach of section 16, a risk to other members or to the Platform, or where the law requires it. Where it is safe and lawful to do so, we will say why and give you a route to respond. Suspension does not cancel what you owe your group.

We may withdraw the Platform. We may change, suspend or discontinue the Platform or any part of it. If we discontinue it altogether, we will give reasonable notice and a means for groups to obtain a copy of their records, so that a group can continue on its own terms.

Sections 4, 12, 13, 16, 18, 19 and 21 survive the end of these Terms.

Our Privacy Policy explains what we collect and why. In summary, and because it bears directly on this agreement:

• Your identity with us is a phone number. We do not hold identity documents.
• Other members of your group see your activity in that group — contributions, loans, repayments, and any receipt photo you attach. Members of other groups see nothing.
• Third parties are involved in delivery. Mobile-money providers process payments; a messaging provider delivers SMS. They receive only what is needed to do that. We do not sell your information to anyone.
• The ledger cannot be erased. Where you have a right to ask for deletion, we will honour it for the information we can delete — your profile details and material not required for the integrity of a group’s financial record. Entries in a group’s ledger, and the audit record of actions taken, are permanent, because a financial record that can be selectively deleted is not a financial record. This is a limit you accept by joining a savings group.
• Receipt photos you attach to a declared payment are stored with that declaration and are visible to your group’s members for as long as the declaration exists.
• You may ask for a copy of your records at info@chama.ke or +254 759 530195.

Where the Data Protection Act, 2019 applies, you have the rights it gives you and may complain to the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner.

Availability. We work to keep the Platform running but do not promise it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or reachable at any particular moment. It depends on mobile networks, mobile-money providers and messaging providers we do not control.

No warranties. To the fullest extent the law allows, the Platform is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. We do not warrant that any group will meet its obligations, that any loan will be repaid, that any member is who or what they claim, or that the Platform will prevent a member from behaving dishonestly.

What we are not liable for. To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for:

• money you lose because another member does not repay, does not contribute, or acts dishonestly;
• decisions your group makes, or rules your group sets;
• the acts or omissions of any official of your group;
• a mobile-money provider's delay, failure, reversal, charge or error;
• an advertiser's product, offer or conduct;
• any indirect, incidental, special or consequential loss, or loss of profit, savings, opportunity, data or reputation.

Cap. Where we are liable despite the above, our total liability to you for all claims is limited to [LIABILITY CAP]. Because the Platform is free to members, there are no fees to refund.

What we do not exclude. Nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded — including for fraud, fraudulent misrepresentation, death or personal injury caused by our negligence, or any right you have under mandatory consumer-protection law.

You indemnify us against claims, losses and reasonable costs arising from your breach of these Terms, your unlawful use of the Platform, or a dispute between you and your group — except to the extent they arise from our own breach.

We may change these Terms. When we make a material change we will give you reasonable notice in the app, and, where the change materially reduces your rights, we will ask you to accept the new version before you continue.

Every version is published with a version number and date, and superseded versions remain available. Continuing to use the Platform after a change takes effect means you accept it. If you do not accept, stop using the Platform and leave your groups under section 11.

Governing law. These Terms are governed by the laws of Kenya.

Disputes with us. If you have a complaint, contact us first at info@chama.ke; most matters are resolved that way. Disputes that cannot be resolved are subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of Kenya. This does not affect any right you have to bring a claim in your local courts where the law gives you that right.

Severability. If any provision is held unenforceable, the rest continues in force and that provision is applied to the fullest extent permitted.

No waiver. If we do not enforce a provision, we do not give up the right to enforce it later.

Assignment. You may not transfer your account or your rights under these Terms. We may transfer ours to a successor of our business, on notice to you.

Force majeure. Neither party is liable for failure caused by events beyond reasonable control, including network or provider outages, natural events, or acts of government.

Entire agreement. These Terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between you and us about the Platform. Your group's own rules govern your relationship with your group; they do not bind us, and where they conflict with these Terms as between you and us, these Terms apply.

Language. These Terms are published in English. Where we provide a translation and it conflicts, the English version governs.

Nanatec Limited, Kasarani Mwiki Road, P.O. Box 38001–00100, Nairobi, Kenya. Legal: info@chama.ke. Support: info@chama.ke or +254 759 530195.