Terms of Service
1. Who you are contracting with
CellTree is operated by African Wood Inc (registration CF/2010/34975), trading as VEDDA. The Obwatoto bwabasefwe mark the platform carries is its own.
African Wood Inc is registered with the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner as a Data Controller under identification 604-5622-D9D7 (certificate serial 23048, valid to 9 June 2028).
The CellTree software is built and licensed by Dhamana Technologies Limited (registration PVT-YQ19VOMK), which is why its name is on the copyright line. Your agreement is with African Wood Inc.
In these terms, “we” and “us” mean African Wood Inc. “You” means whoever is reading this in the capacity they are using CellTree in — a campaign, or a member of one.
2. What CellTree is
CellTree is organising software for political campaigns in Kenya. A campaign uses it to build a membership structure of ten-person cells inside a ward, to set and track win targets against the register, to record what its candidates will owe at nomination, and to collect member contributions through M-Pesa.
What CellTree is not. It is not connected to the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission, it does not register anybody to vote, it does not cast, count or transmit votes, and it has no role in any electoral process. Nothing it displays is an official electoral record. Where it shows how many voters a ward has, that figure is either a projection we have calculated or a figure a campaign has typed in from a register it bought — never a live feed from the IEBC.
3. Who may use it
- You must be at least 18 years old.
- You must hold a Kenyan National ID, because identity on CellTree is anchored to one. We never store the number itself — see the Privacy Policy — but you must have one to be verified.
- You must be acting for yourself. Registering on somebody else’s behalf, or with somebody else’s ID, ends the account and may be an offence.
- A campaign must be a real political campaign, party, or aspirant, and the person applying must have authority to bind it.
4. Your account and how you sign in
There is no password. You sign in with your phone number and a six-digit code we send to it. That has a consequence worth stating plainly: whoever controls your phone number can sign in as you.
- Never pass a sign-in code to anyone, including anyone claiming to be from CellTree or from your campaign. We will never ask you for one.
- If you lose your phone or your SIM, tell your campaign or us immediately so the number can be marked lost and locked out. A number marked lost cannot receive codes or sign in until the account is re-pointed at a new number.
- Changing your phone number does not create a new account. Your identity on CellTree is anchored to a permanent, one-way digest of your National ID, and the phone number is only the route we reach you by.
5. Campaigns
Applying
A campaign applies at celltree.app/apply, or is invited by a platform administrator. An application asks for the campaign’s name, the office intended, and the applicant’s own name, phone and identity verification. An application is a queue entry: it collects no money and holds no members.
Approval and the registration fee
If we approve the application we issue a fee note. The registration fee is currently KES 16,499 and the note expires 14 days after issue. Access is granted automatically once the fee settles. If the note expires unpaid, the application lapses and must be made again.
It buys access, and nothing else. Paying it switches the campaign on. It does not include voter registers, identity verification, or anything a campaign collects from its own members — each of those is charged separately and priced where it appears. A campaign that has paid this has bought the door, not what is behind it.
The fee exists to make casual and abusive applications costly. It is not a subscription and it does not entitle a campaign to any particular outcome, ranking, feature, or level of support.
Refusal
We may refuse an application, and we will give a reason. We will refuse applications that appear fraudulent, that misrepresent who is behind the campaign, or that we reasonably judge to be intended for a purpose in section 9.
What a campaign is responsible for
A campaign is the data controller for the personal data of its members. We process that data on the campaign’s instructions, as its processor. This is not a formality: it means the campaign — not us — decides what member data is collected and why, answers its members’ data-protection requests, and is accountable to the ODPC for them. The terms of that relationship are in the Data Processing Agreement — available in the console once a campaign is approved, and forming part of these terms for every campaign.
6. Members and supporters
You join a campaign by invitation — a link from the campaign, or from a supporter it has authorised. Joining means:
- Verification. Your identity is checked against your National ID through our verification provider. We keep the verdict and a one-way digest; we do not keep the number or the document.
- Placement in a cell. You are placed in a ten-person cell within a ward. Your cell-mates can see you are a member of the cell. You may choose to show only your initials to them.
- Contributions. A campaign sets its own entry fee and optional monthly upkeep. Both are paid through M-Pesa and both go to the campaign.
Membership of a campaign on CellTree is a matter between you and that campaign. It is not membership of a political party, which is registered separately under the Political Parties Act, and it has no bearing on your registration as a voter.
You may leave at any time, and you may ask for your personal data to be erased. What erasure destroys, and the one record that survives it, are described in the Privacy Policy.
7. Voter registers
A campaign may buy access to a certified register from the IEBC through CellTree. The IEBC sets the list price by scope; we add a margin for handling and support. What you pay is shown before you pay it.
| Scope | IEBC list price |
|---|---|
| One ward | KES 10,000 |
| One constituency | KES 30,000 |
| One county | KES 50,000 |
| The whole country | KES 100,000 |
A register is lawful for one purpose and one only. A campaign that obtains a register may use it for the electoral purpose it was released for. Using it to market, to canvass commercially, to build a profile of anyone, to sell or pass on to anyone else, or to publish it, is unlawful under the Elections Act and the Data Protection Act, and it is a breach of these terms that ends a campaign’s access immediately. Buying it through us changes none of that.
Buying a register does not import it. The IEBC hands over a document and somebody at the campaign still enters the figures. We do not verify those figures and we are not responsible for them.
8. Money
- All amounts are in Kenya Shillings and include any tax unless stated otherwise.
- Payments are collected through Safaricom’s M-Pesa (Daraja) and, where a campaign has configured it, Pesapal. We do not see or hold your M-Pesa PIN.
- Member contributions belong to the campaign, less any platform fee disclosed at the time. We are not a party to what a campaign does with them.
- Fees are not refundable once the thing they bought has been delivered — an approved campaign, a granted access, a released register. Where we refuse an application or fail to deliver, we refund in full.
- Where a payment settles but the corresponding access is not granted, tell us. That is a fault on our side and we will fix it or refund.
9. What you may not do
Using CellTree, you must not:
- Bribe, treat, or induce a voter. Using member payments, upkeep, or any other transfer on this platform as an inducement to vote, or not to vote, or to vote a particular way, is an electoral offence. It is the single most serious misuse this platform could be put to, and it ends an account with no notice and a report.
- Incite violence, or post anything amounting to hate speech or ethnic contempt under the National Cohesion and Integration Act.
- Register anyone without their knowledge, or upload anyone else’s personal data without a lawful basis for doing so.
- Use a register, a member list, or any data taken from CellTree for anything other than the campaign purpose it was collected for.
- Impersonate another person, campaign, party, or the IEBC.
- Attempt to reach data belonging to another campaign, probe or attack the service, or work around a limit we have set.
- Scrape, resell, or redistribute the service or its data.
10. What you post
Cell boards carry discussion between members. What you write stays yours; you give us and your campaign the permission we need to store it, show it to the people it is addressed to, and back it up.
A campaign may analyse discussion on its boards to understand what its members care about, but only where the member has separately consented to that — it is not covered by joining. You can withdraw that consent without leaving the campaign.
We may remove content that breaches section 9. We do not otherwise moderate campaigns’ internal discussion, and we do not endorse any of it.
11. Suspension and closure
We may suspend or close an account, or a whole campaign, where there is a breach of section 9, where a payment is reversed or fraudulent, where we are required to by law, or where continuing would put other people’s data at risk.
Except where the breach is serious enough to require acting immediately, we will say what the problem is and give a reasonable opportunity to fix it. Closure does not by itself erase personal data; erasure is dealt with in the Privacy Policy.
You may close your own account at any time.
12. Availability
We work to keep CellTree available and we do not promise it always will be. The app is built to keep working offline and to reconcile when a connection returns, which covers most of what a field organiser meets — but it does not cover everything, and an election timetable does not pause for an outage. Do not make CellTree the only place a critical record exists.
We may change or withdraw features. Where a change removes something a campaign is relying on, we will give reasonable notice.
13. Liability
Nothing here limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited — including our obligations as a data processor under the Data Protection Act, 2019.
Subject to that, we are not liable for electoral outcomes, for decisions a campaign takes on the strength of figures shown in the platform, for what a campaign does with its members’ data, or for loss of profit, goodwill, or opportunity. Our total liability to a campaign in any twelve-month period is limited to the amounts that campaign paid us in that period.
14. Changes to these terms
We may change these terms. Where a change materially affects your rights we will give at least 30 days’ notice through the platform and, for campaigns, by message. Continuing to use CellTree after a change takes effect means you accept it; if you do not, you may close your account and, where you have paid in advance for something not yet delivered, ask for that part back.
15. Law and disputes
These terms are governed by the laws of Kenya, and the courts of Kenya have jurisdiction.
Complaints about how personal data is handled can go to the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner at odpc.go.ke, whether or not you have raised them with us first — though we would rather you did, because we can usually fix it faster.
16. Contact
- General and support
- support@veddaonline.com
- Data protection
- support@veddaonline.com — mark it for the attention of the Data Protection Officer.