For parents and guardians

If the young person in your care is under 18, they cannot complete registration alone. Nigeria's data protection law and Ghana's both treat under-18s as children, and the African Youth Charter defines youth as beginning at 15 — so AYC accepts registrations from 15 upwards, with a guardian's consent.

In practice they will be asked for your name, your relationship to them, and your phone number. We then contact you directly with a code, and their registration only completes once you have confirmed it. Nobody can register a fifteen-year-old by typing a guardian's name into a form; the confirmation has to come from you, on your own phone.

What we hold about them is deliberately small: a phone number, a name, a country, a year of birth, and their language. Not a full date of birth unless a programme genuinely requires it. Not an address, unless they later ask for something to be posted to them. Not identification documents, unless a specific programme asks and they choose to provide them.

Programmes are published either by us or by organisations we have verified, and a partner sees no applicant's details until a data-sharing agreement is on record. What each programme asks for beyond the profile is shown before an application is submitted.

Applying is free. Every programme on this site is free to apply to, and nobody will ask a young person for money at any stage. If anyone does, tell us.

You can withdraw consent at any time, and you can ask us for a copy of everything we hold or for it to be deleted. The privacy notice explains how, and it is written to be read before registering rather than after.