Data deletion

You cannot create a IEMS account yourself. Schools issue accounts to their staff, learners and guardians, and there is no self sign-up in the app or on this site. That is why the app offers no delete-my-account button: the account is not yours to create, and deleting a learner’s record is a decision with academic and legal consequences for the school that holds it.

To have your account closed and your personal information erased, ask your school, or write to privacy@iems.africa and we will route it to your school and follow up. Records the school must keep by law are retained for their retention period and nothing more is done with them.

For as long as your school needs it. School records carry statutory retention periods — financial records, academic results and disciplinary matters typically for years after a learner leaves — and the school, not IEMS, decides when its retention period has run. The audit log is kept for at least seven years. When a school leaves the platform, its data is exported to it and then deleted on the schedule in its agreement.

Deleting a record inside the platform usually marks it deleted rather than erasing it immediately, so that a mistaken deletion can be undone and an audit trail survives. Permanent erasure is a separate, deliberate step.

Most learners on this platform are children, and their information is handled as such. A guardian’s consent stands behind the processing of a learner’s information, and anything sensitive is gated on it being recorded rather than assumed: a learner cannot be enrolled on a fingerprint scanner without it, and features that would show a child’s details to the whole school rather than to the staff who teach them are off until a guardian turns them on. Learners under 13 are not given their own logins. We do not advertise to children, profile them, or use their information for any purpose beyond their school’s.

You may ask what is held about you, ask for it to be corrected, ask for it to be deleted, object to a use of it, and complain to your country’s regulator. Because your school is the responsible party, the fastest route is your school’s office, which can act on most requests the same day. If your school asks us, we help it; if you write to privacy@iems.africa directly, we pass the request to your school and tell you we have.

The regulators are the Information Regulator in South Africa, the Nigeria Data Protection Commission, the Data Protection Commission in Ghana and the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner in Kenya.