What we collect, and what we do with it.

Last updated 10 September 2026

Who we are

ABU Cats Club | Animal Welfare is a registered student association at Ahmadu Bello University, Samaru Campus, Zaria, Kaduna State. For the purposes of the Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023, the club is the data controller for the information described here — it decides what is collected and why. Our address for these questions is info@abucatsclub.com.

This policy covers www.abucatsclub.com. It does not cover Instagram, LinkedIn, WhatsApp or any other service we link to — those are run by other companies under their own policies.

What we collect, and why

Four forms on this site send us information. Each one collects only what the officer answering it actually needs.

Reporting a welfare case

What is being reported, a description, the location, when the animal was seen, and — so that we can come back to you — your name, phone number, email address and whether you can help on the day. You may also attach up to three photographs.

Only the description and location are strictly required. If you would rather not leave your name, leave it out: an anonymous report is still a report, and we would much rather have it than not.

Getting involved

Your name, email address, phone number and department or organisation, plus whichever of these applies: the areas you want to work in and your availability; your level of study and matriculation number; or the kind of organisation you represent and what you can offer.

Contacting us

Your name, email address, phone number, the subject and your message.

Ordering from the shop

The item, size and quantity, your name, phone number, email address and where you want it delivered. We do not take payment on this website. No card number, bank detail or payment credential is ever entered here or held by us.

Photographs you send us

Photographs attached to a welfare report are used to assess the animal and nothing else. We will not publish one — not on this site, not on Instagram, not anywhere — unless you have told us we may. If a photograph happens to show a person, tell us and we will delete it once the case is closed.

What we do not do

• No cookies. This site sets none, of any kind.
• No advertising, and no advertising networks.
• No profiles and no automated decisions. A person reads everything you send.
• No accounts. There is nothing to sign up for and no password to lose.
• No selling or renting your details. Not to anyone, at any price.

Site search runs entirely inside your browser. What you type into the search box never reaches us, so we could not read your searches even if we wanted to.

Your IP address

We do not store it. To stop a machine flooding the report form and burying a real case, each submission is counted against a one-way scrambled version of the sender's address — a hash. It cannot be turned back into an address, it is not linked to your name, and it is used for nothing but counting: at most five submissions from one sender in ten minutes, and twenty across everyone in a minute.

Who sees what you send

Each form goes to one officer's club mailbox — not to a shared inbox, and not to the whole committee.

If you send	It goes to	So that
A welfare report	The Welfare Director	To reach the animal and get back to you
Volunteering	The Volunteer Coordinator	To place you on a team
Membership	The General Secretary	To register you as a member
Partnership or press	The President or Research Officer	To reply to the proposal
Adoption or rehoming	The Welfare Director	To match a cat and arrange a home check
A story you send in	The Media Director	To consider it for publication
Donations and orders	The Treasurer	To confirm the item and arrange delivery

Officers change at the end of each session. Access to these mailboxes is handed over with the office and withdrawn from the outgoing officer.

Where it is kept

A copy of every submission is written to a private store so that nothing is lost if an email fails to arrive. That store is separate from the one holding the public content of this site, and it cannot be read without a key that only the club holds — an ordinary visitor querying it gets nothing back.

These are the companies that handle it on our behalf:

• Sanity — stores the site's content and the private copy of submissions.
• Resend — delivers the notification email to the officer.
• Zoho Mail — hosts the club mailboxes the officers read.
• Vercel — hosts the website itself, and counts page views without cookies and without identifying anyone.
• Google Fonts — serves the two typefaces this site uses. Loading them means your device contacts Google's servers, which sees your IP address. We receive nothing from this.

All of them operate servers outside Nigeria, mainly in the United States and Europe, so your information is transferred abroad to reach them. Each is bound by its own contractual terms to process it only as instructed by us.

How long we keep things

• Welfare reports — two years after the case is closed. They are the club's record of what happened to an animal, and are frequently needed again.
• Membership and volunteer applications — for as long as you are involved with the club, and one session afterwards.
• General enquiries — one year.
• Orders — one year, for the club's accounts.
• The scrambled sender hash — deleted with the submission it belongs to.

If you ask us to delete something sooner, we will, unless we are obliged to keep it.

When you tell us about somebody else

A report sometimes names a person — someone who was hurting an animal, or a neighbour who owns it. We use that only to deal with the case, we do not publish it, and we do not hand it on except where an animal is being harmed and the University or the authorities need to be told. Please tell us only what is needed to help the animal.

Names and photographs we publish

The executives page carries officers' names, roles, photographs and, where they chose to give them, links to their professional profiles — published because they hold an office in a student association, and removed when they ask.

The gallery and stories show photographs taken by club members at our own events, most of them public campus activities. If you are in one and would rather not be, write to editor@abucatsclub.com with enough detail to find the picture. We will take it down. You do not have to give a reason, and we will not ask for one.

Your rights

Under the Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023 you may ask us to:

• tell you what we hold about you, and give you a copy;
• correct anything that is wrong;
• delete it;
• stop using it, or restrict what we use it for;
• hand it to you in a portable form;
• stop relying on your consent, where consent is what we relied on. Withdrawing it does not undo what was done beforehand.

Write to info@abucatsclub.com. We will reply within 30 days. There is no charge. We may ask you to confirm who you are, so that we do not hand your information to somebody else.

If you are not satisfied with how we have handled it, you can complain to the Nigeria Data Protection Commission.

Keeping it safe

The site is served over an encrypted connection. Submissions are stored in a private, key-protected store, and the keys are held by the club and not written into the website. Forms accept submissions only from this site's own pages. None of this makes anything perfect: no website can promise that, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

Children

This site is meant for university students, staff and the surrounding community. We do not knowingly collect information from a child under 13. If you believe a child has sent us something, tell us and we will delete it.

Changes

If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it. If the change is a significant one, we will say so on the site rather than quietly amend the page.

Contact

ABU Cats Club | Animal Welfare
Ahmadu Bello University, Samaru Campus, Zaria, Kaduna State
info@abucatsclub.com
WhatsApp +234 707 759 1946

For anything about an animal that needs help now, do not use this page — send a report.