Terms of Use — End-User Licence Agreement (EULA)
These terms govern access to and use of the MACL platform.
1Acceptance of Terms
By accessing and using the MACL platform, you agree to be bound by this End-User Licence Agreement. If you do not agree, you must not use the platform. MACL is a Capstone research project developed at African Leadership University and is not a licensed audit, financial, or regulatory compliance service.
2Research Status and Synthetic Data
MACL is a research prototype deployed for evaluation and demonstration purposes. All programme data on the platform is synthetic and researcher-generated, and no real organisational, financial, or beneficiary data is processed. The system does not move money and does not hold funds. The ledger records agreements, reported results, approvals, and document hashes only, and no cryptocurrency is used anywhere in the system. Users must understand this status clearly before relying on anything the platform displays.
3Roles and Authority
Access is limited to organisations registered on the network by the administrator: an implementing NGO, a government monitoring and evaluation unit, and a donor. What an account is allowed to do is enforced by the smart contracts themselves according to the registered type of the organisation, and not only by the interface. All organisations share the same read views of every record. This mutual visibility is a deliberate accountability feature and it cannot be disabled for any single organisation.
4Records, Endorsement, and Finality
A compliance record is finalised only after two of the three registered organisations endorse it, and the same organisation cannot endorse twice. Once finalised, a record is permanent and cannot be modified by any party, including the administrator. Users are advised to verify the contents of a record before endorsing it, because an endorsement cannot be withdrawn. In the current research version, an organisation that submitted a report is technically able to endorse it. The working practice is that records are finalised by two non-submitting organisations, and this governance rule is a documented requirement for any production version.
5Ledger Immutability
Records written to the distributed ledger are permanent by design. Errors are corrected by submitting a corrected report that goes through evaluation and endorsement again, never by editing or deleting history. This permanence is what makes the audit trail trustworthy, and it is also why users must review what they submit before submitting it.
6Limitation of Liability
MACL is a Capstone academic project and is not a regulated audit or compliance service. The platform is provided as is for research and demonstration purposes. The developer makes no warranties regarding the platform’s fitness for operational use, uninterrupted service, or freedom from technical errors. To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, the developer shall not be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, or consequential damages arising from the use of the platform.
7Intellectual Property
All code, design, and content comprising the MACL platform is the original work of Aimee Gloire Imaragahinda, developed as part of the BSc Software Engineering Capstone at African Leadership University. Open-source software is used under its respective licences with attribution: Hyperledger Besu (Apache-2.0), Hardhat (MIT), ethers.js (MIT), the Solidity compiler (GPL-3.0, as a build tool), and Tailwind CSS (MIT). Unauthorised reproduction or commercial use of the platform’s code or design is not permitted.
Privacy Policy
How MACL collects, uses, stores, and protects data, and the rights you hold over it.
1Data We Collect
MACL collects the following categories of data when an organisation is registered and uses the platform: organisation account information, including the organisation name and type, the institutional email address of its representative, and a password stored only as a bcrypt hash; session data in the form of authentication tokens; uploaded evidence documents and their metadata, stored off-chain; and on-chain records consisting of pseudonymous organisational identifiers, agreement terms and targets, reported values and their PASS/FAIL/FLAG outcomes, endorsements, approvals, document hashes, and timestamps. During the research period, all programme content is synthetic.
2How We Use Your Data
Your data is used solely for the purposes of operating the MACL platform. Account information is used to authenticate your organisation and to scope what your role can do. On-chain records exist to provide the shared, tamper-evident audit trail that is the purpose of the platform. Your data is not sold, is not shared with third parties, and is not used for advertising or profiling of any kind.
3Data Storage and Security
Personal and document data is stored off-chain in a PostgreSQL database. The distributed ledger stores no personal data and no document contents, only hashes and pseudonymous identifiers. Passwords are hashed using bcrypt before storage and are never stored in plain text. All data transmission between your browser and the platform is encrypted via HTTPS. The API is the sole holder of the ledger signing keys, authentication tokens can be revoked, requests are rate limited, and cross-origin access is restricted to the deployed application. These measures were verified through a security audit completed before deployment.
4Ledger Data and Visibility
MACL runs on a permissioned network. Ledger contents are visible to the participating organisations and not to the general public, and there is no public block explorer. However, everything written to the ledger is permanent and visible to all three organisations for the life of the network. Documents belong in the off-chain store, where only their hashes are recorded on the chain, so that no content that a party could later have a right to erase is written to the ledger itself.
5Your Data Rights
In accordance with Rwanda’s Law No. 058/2021 on the Protection of Personal Data and Privacy, you have the right to access the personal data MACL holds about you, request corrections to inaccurate data, and request deletion of your off-chain account data and uploaded documents. Please note that records stored on the distributed ledger are immutable and cannot be deleted. This limitation is inherent to the technology and it is disclosed here plainly.
6Data Retention
MACL retains off-chain account data while the organisation remains registered on the network, and this data is deleted on deregistration. Research data from the usability study is retained according to ALU policy and then securely destroyed. Ledger records are permanent and cannot be deleted.
Contact
Questions, data requests, or concerns about this Privacy Policy or the Terms of Use.
MACL · BSc Software Engineering Capstone · African Leadership University · Kigali, Rwanda · Back to top