Mwana privacy policy

Last updated: 5 October 2026

1. Who is responsible

Mwana is published by Mwana Education, represented by Cédric Lecouturier, in Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of the Congo). For any question about your data or your child’s data: contact.mwana@gmail.com.

2. Who Mwana is for

Mwana is a homework helper for primary-school children aged 5 to 13. The app must be installed and set up by a parent or responsible adult, who creates the child’s profile and remains responsible for its use.

3. The data Mwana uses

The child’s profile

The parent enters a first name, an age band and a school grade. This information is stored on the phone only. The age band, the grade and the selected mode accompany each message so the answer can be adapted. The real first name is masked: it is replaced by a neutral placeholder before the message is sent to our server, and therefore before anything is sent to OpenAI.

Messages

What the child types or dictates is sent to our server, then to our artificial-intelligence provider, to produce the answer. The most recent messages of the conversation are sent again with each question to keep the thread. The conversation history is kept mainly on the phone. Our server passes messages on without keeping a copy; OpenAI may keep a temporary copy (see “Our providers”).

The text field is free-form: a child may choose to type other personal information (a family name, an address, a phone number, the name of the school). Mwana does not guarantee that it will automatically detect or remove all personal information typed freely before it is processed: it may therefore be part of the message that is sent. We recommend that parents explain to the child not to do so.

Exercise photos

When the child photographs an exercise, the image is stored in a private space, with access restricted to the device that sent it, then passed to our artificial-intelligence provider to be read. It may remain stored for up to 30 days, then it is deleted automatically; it is deleted earlier if the profile is deleted. After that deletion, our hosting provider keeps it for up to 7 more days in a technical recovery area, before permanent erasure.

Voice

Mwana does not store the child’s voice: the app creates no audio file and sends no sound to its own servers. Dictation and read-aloud go through the voice services of the phone or the browser (depending on the device: Google, Samsung or Apple). That provider may process voice on its own servers, under its own privacy rules. Only the resulting text is then sent, like a typed message.

Technical data

Each installation receives an anonymous technical identifier, not linked to the child’s identity. It is used to protect access to photos and to limit abuse (number of messages and photos per day). Our servers also keep technical logs: date, duration, error codes and connection data such as the IP address. These logs contain neither the text of messages nor the photos.

Audience measurement

Mwana uses neither Google Analytics, nor any advertising tracker, nor an advertising identifier. The current version of the app does, however, contain a technical tool from Google, “Firebase Performance Monitoring”. It measures how well the app runs: for example start-up time, the duration and size of some network exchanges, the phone model, the system version, the country and the app version, linked to an installation identifier. It receives neither the text of messages, nor the photos, nor the first name.

4. What Mwana does not do

• No account, email or phone number is requested.
• No advertising.
• No selling or renting of data.
• No location, no access to contacts.
• The microphone and the camera are used only when the child taps the corresponding button.

5. Our providers

We use the OpenAI setting that asks it not to store the exchanges in its service. This setting does not remove all retention: OpenAI states that it keeps messages and images in safety logs for up to 30 days, to detect abuse. OpenAI also states that by default it does not use this data to train its models. Data is therefore processed outside the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

6. Retention periods

7. What a parent can delete today

For now, Mwana has no dedicated parents’ area and no parental code. Here is exactly what is possible today:

• Delete a child’s profile: on the app’s home screen, long-press the profile. The profile and all its history are erased from the phone, and the app requests deletion of the child’s photos at our hosting provider. If the phone is offline at that moment, those photos will be removed by the automatic 30-day rule.
• Erase everything from the phone: uninstall the app. Profiles and history disappear from the phone; photos already sent are removed by the automatic 30-day rule.
• What cannot be deleted on request: the technical recovery copy of photos (up to 7 days), technical logs (30 days), technical performance measurements and OpenAI’s safety logs (up to 30 days). They expire on their own.
• No individual deletion: today, Mwana does not allow a single message or a single photo to be deleted from the app. Deleting a profile erases its local history and triggers the deletion of its photos stored on the server.

For any question, write to contact.mwana@gmail.com. Because Mwana works without an account, we cannot find a child’s data from the child’s name: deletion is done from the app, as described above.

8. Security

Exchanges are encrypted in transit. Access to photos is restricted to the device that sent them. The access key to the artificial intelligence stays on our server and is never present in the app. As no system is perfect, our main protection is to limit what we collect.

9. Answers from the artificial intelligence

Mwana is set up to answer in words suited to children and to guide without giving the solution. An artificial intelligence can still make mistakes: its answers replace neither the teacher nor the parent.

10. Changes

If this policy changes, the new version will be published on this page with its update date.