Contributor Terms & Conditions

1. Parties and acceptance

These Contributor Terms & Conditions (“Terms”) form a binding agreement between you (“Contributor”, “you”) and DataYetu (“DataYetu”, “we”, “us”, “our”) governing your use of the DataYetu platform to submit, review, or otherwise work with data for dataset products.

By scrolling through these Terms and clicking “Accept & continue”, or by submitting any contribution after acceptance, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agree to these Terms and our Privacy Policy.

If you do not agree, do not contribute data or accept these Terms.

2. Eligibility and capacity

You must be at least 18 years old and have legal capacity to enter contracts under the Laws of Kenya.

You confirm that you are not prohibited from receiving compensation for digital services under applicable law, and that any information you provide about your identity or payout details is accurate.

If you contribute on behalf of an organisation, you represent that you are authorised to bind that organisation.

3. Consent for commercial AI training and dataset use

You expressly consent that DataYetu and its customers, partners, and licensees may use your contributions—and derived annotations, transcripts, labels, metadata, and dataset packages—for commercial purposes, including but not limited to: training, evaluating, fine-tuning, benchmarking, and improving artificial intelligence and machine learning systems; building and selling datasets; research; product development; and related analytics.

This consent is specific, informed, and voluntary. You may stop contributing at any time, but content already accepted into a dataset release may continue to be used under the licence you grant in these Terms, as described in Section 5.

Where required for provenance or audit (including TRACE or similar systems), we may publish non-identifying public audit metadata about a contribution (for example content hashes, anonymised contributor IDs, consent version hashes, and timestamps). We will not put your name, email, phone number, or wallet address into public Trace payloads.

4. What you may submit

You may submit text, audio, and other modalities we enable for a given project, together with optional non-sensitive context (such as language variety or city).

You must only submit content that: (a) you created or lawfully control; (b) you have the right to licence as described here; and (c) does not unlawfully disclose personal data about other people without a lawful basis.

Do not submit passwords, government ID numbers, full payment card numbers, medical records of identifiable third parties, content involving minors, or material that is illegal, harassing, hateful, or infringing under Kenyan or other applicable law.

Voice recordings may capture characteristics of your voice. By submitting audio, you consent to processing of that voice data for the purposes in these Terms and the Privacy Policy.

5. Licence grant and intellectual property

You retain ownership of your original raw contributions to the extent recognised by law. In exchange for access to the platform and any compensation that may become payable, you grant DataYetu a worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free (except for any compensation we expressly agree to pay you), transferable, and sublicensable licence to use, reproduce, host, modify, adapt, translate, annotate, create derivative works from, commercialise, distribute, publicly perform, and display your contributions and all labels/annotations associated with them for the purposes in Section 3.

To the maximum extent permitted by the Laws of Kenya, you waive (and agree not to assert) any moral rights or similar rights in the contributions against DataYetu and its licensees, so that we can use and adapt the materials for dataset and AI training purposes.

You will not claim that DataYetu or its customers owe you royalties, residuals, or ongoing fees beyond the compensation programme described in Section 6.

6. Compensation (variable; not guaranteed)

Compensation, if any, depends on factors including: the active project or dataset being sourced; modality (for example text vs voice); sample length/quality; whether a sample is approved after review; role (contributor, annotator, or reviewer); published rate cards; quality multipliers; and applicable thresholds for withdrawal.

Rates may change over time and may differ between projects. The rate card shown in the Payments area is indicative for currently configured projects and does not guarantee future rates.

Rejected, unusable, fraudulent, duplicate, or out-of-scope submissions may receive no payment or may be forfeited. We may withhold or reverse credits for policy violations or quality failures.

Withdrawals (including stablecoin payouts such as USDC on Base) are subject to thresholds, wallet verification, operational review, network fees, and legal/compliance checks. On-chain transfers involve risk; once sent to your wallet address, we are not responsible for loss due to incorrect addresses, third-party wallets, or blockchain network failures.

You are solely responsible for any taxes, levies, or reporting obligations arising from compensation under Kenyan law or the law of your residence.

7. Quality, review, and platform rules

Submissions enter a human annotation and review pipeline. Approval is required before inclusion in exportable datasets. We may sample tasks for additional quality assurance.

You agree to follow project guidelines (including the Contributor Guide), not to manipulate queues, not to submit spam or AI-generated filler presented as genuine local speech/text where originality is required, and not to attempt to game compensation systems.

We may suspend or terminate accounts, discard contributions, and forfeit pending rewards for abuse or material breach.

8. Privacy

Our collection and use of personal data is described in the Privacy Policy. By accepting these Terms you also acknowledge that Privacy Policy.

You can open the Privacy Policy from the link shown on the consent screen or at /legal/privacy.

9. Disclaimers and limitation of liability

The platform is provided on an “as is” and “as available” basis. We do not warrant uninterrupted availability, error-free annotation tools, or that any particular contribution will be accepted or paid.

To the maximum extent permitted by Kenyan law, DataYetu’s aggregate liability arising out of these Terms or your contributions is limited to the greater of (a) the total compensation actually paid to you in the three (3) months preceding the claim, or (b) five thousand Kenyan shillings (KES 5,000). We are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, or consequential losses, including lost profits or data, except where liability cannot be limited by law (including fraud or death/personal injury caused by negligence where such exclusion is unlawful).

10. Indemnity

You agree to indemnify and hold harmless DataYetu from claims, losses, and reasonable legal costs arising from your breach of these Terms, your infringement of third-party rights, or unlawful content you submit, except to the extent caused by our wilful misconduct.

11. Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the Laws of Kenya.

The courts of Kenya have exclusive jurisdiction, without prejudice to any mandatory consumer protections that may apply if you qualify as a consumer under applicable law.

Before filing a claim, you agree to contact us at hello@datayetu.com and attempt good-faith resolution for at least fourteen (14) days.

12. Changes, termination, and contact

We may update these Terms by posting a new version and updating the effective date/version. Material changes affecting ongoing contributions will require renewed acceptance before further submissions.

You may stop using the platform at any time. Provisions that by nature should survive (including licence grants for already accepted contributions, limitation of liability, and governing law) survive termination.

Contact: hello@datayetu.com. DataYetu operates these Terms with Kenya as the primary legal jurisdiction for this programme.