Privacy notice

Who we are

Coetara Forge is a platform of Coetara Technologies Limited, a company registered in Nigeria. We are the data controller for the personal data described here. Contact us about privacy at forge@coetara.com.

What we collect

• When you enter the Forge Hackathon 2026: your name, email, phone number, country and city, optional profile links, your team details, your answers about your venture and yourself, and your choices about the Lagos final, follow-up work and updates.
• When you send a partner enquiry: your name, organisation, role, contact details and message.
• Automatically: the page and campaign that brought you to us (for example a link tag), your browser type, and a one-way scrambled version of your IP address used only to stop spam. We do not store your IP address itself.

Why we use it

• To run the Hackathon: reviewing, scoring and shortlisting entries, and contacting you about your entry.
• To respond to partner enquiries.
• If you ask us to: to consider you for paid project work with Forge ventures and partners, and to send you news about future cohorts and events. You can withdraw either at any time.
• To keep the site secure and understand which channels bring people to us.

Our legal bases are your consent, the steps needed to process your entry at your request, and our legitimate interest in running a fair and secure selection process.

Who sees it

Only the Forge team, its reviewers and judges, and the service providers that host and operate the site on our behalf: our database host (Supabase), our website host (Vercel) and, where used, our email provider. They process data only on our instructions. Some of these providers store data outside Nigeria. Where they do, we rely on contractual and technical safeguards that meet the requirements of the Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023. We do not sell your data.

How long we keep it

Hackathon entries are kept for 24 months after the Hackathon closes, so that we can consider entrants for future cohorts, then deleted or anonymised. Partner enquiries are kept for as long as the conversation is active and 24 months after. If you ask us to delete your data sooner, we will.

Your rights

You can ask to see the data we hold about you, correct it, delete it, restrict or object to how we use it, take a copy of it, or withdraw your consent. Email forge@coetara.com and we will respond within 30 days. If you are unhappy with how we handle your data, you can complain to the Nigeria Data Protection Commission.

Security

Data is encrypted in transit, stored in an access-controlled database, and available only to the people who need it to run the Hackathon.

Changes

If we change this notice in a way that affects you, we will update this page and, where appropriate, tell you by email.