Privacy Policy

The South Sudan Health Informatics Associations ("we", "our", "us") operates the self-paced learning platform at https://academy.sshia.org. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, disclose and safeguard your information when you use our learning platform.

1. Information We Collect

We collect information that you provide directly to us when you register for an account, enrol in a course, make a payment, upload documents, or communicate with us. This includes:

• Account information: your name, email address, username, phone number and password (encrypted).
• Education information: the education level, institution and study details you submit during course registration.
• Enrolment and learning data: the courses you enrol in, your topic completion progress, time spent on topics, exam attempts, answers, results and certificates earned.
• Payment information: payment references, amounts, payment method (MTN Mobile Money or cash) and any payment proofs you upload. We never store your full mobile-money PIN or card details on our servers.
• Technical information: IP address, browser type, device information and session logs used for security and service improvement.

2. How We Use Your Information

We use your information to operate and maintain the learning platform, to process your course enrolments and payments, to track your learning progress and examination results, to issue certificates and result slips, to send you transactional notifications (such as payment receipts and enrolment confirmations), to verify certificates presented by third parties, and to secure the platform against fraud and abuse.

3. Certificate Verification

Certificates issued by the platform carry a unique certificate number and verification code. When a certificate is verified through our public verification page, we record the verification event (date and code used) to protect the integrity of our certification. Only the certificate holder's name, course title, issue date and validity status are shown to the verifier.

4. Data Sharing

We do not sell or rent your personal information. We share data only with: payment processors (MTN Mobile Money) strictly to process transactions you initiate; email service providers used to deliver notifications; and professional advisers or authorities where required by law. Aggregated, de-identified statistics may be used for reporting on public-health training coverage.

5. Data Retention

Your learning records — including progress, exam results and certificates — are retained for as long as your account is active and for a reasonable archival period afterwards, because certificates must remain verifiable. You may request deletion of your account; certificates already issued may be retained in anonymised form for verification integrity.

6. Your Rights

You have the right to access the personal data we hold about you, to correct inaccurate data, to request deletion where legally permitted, and to object to certain processing. To exercise any of these rights, contact us through the support page.

7. Security

We protect your data with industry-standard measures including encrypted storage of sensitive values, hashed passwords, role-based access control, audit logging and secure HTTPS transport.

8. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. Material changes will be announced on the platform. Continued use of the platform after changes constitutes acceptance of the updated policy.