1. Who we are
EABD ("EABD", "we", "us", "our") is the East African Business Database, operated by TECHenya Solutions, a Kenyan company with its principal address in Nairobi. You can reach us at [email protected] for general matters and at [email protected] for legal notices.
2. Accepting these terms
These terms apply whenever you use EABD, including the website at eabd.co.ke, any subdomain, our API and any mobile app we publish. If you use EABD for a business, you confirm that you may bind that business to these terms. If you do not agree with any part of them, please do not use EABD.
3. Who may use EABD
You must be at least 18 years old, or the age of majority where you live if that is higher. You must not be barred from using our services under the laws of Kenya or any other country where we operate, and you must not appear on a UN or US sanctions list. We may refuse service to anyone, at any time, for any reason that is not unlawful.
4. Accounts
You must confirm your email address before you can use your account. Keep your sign-in details secure and do not share, sell or lend your account. If you think someone else has used it, tell us straight away at [email protected]. You are responsible for what happens under your account until you tell us it has been compromised.
5. Listings and business content
When you create or claim a business listing, you confirm four things. The business is real and registered where the law requires it. The information you give is accurate and current. You have the authority to publish it for the business. And the content does not infringe anyone else's rights.
You can claim an existing listing in three ways: with a link we send to an email address on the business's own website domain (or one already on the listing), by paying the claim fee shown on the claim page, or by asking our team to confirm you. A paid claim makes you the owner as soon as the payment goes through. For 12 hours afterwards, changes to the listing's phone number, WhatsApp number, emails and website wait before they show, and we tell the email addresses already on the listing about the claim. If someone at the business reports it, those changes stay on hold while we check, and we may reverse a claim the business did not make. If someone later proves an email address on the business's own domain, the listing passes to them. We refund the claim fee when your payment completes after someone else has already claimed the listing. When we reverse a claim, or a listing passes to the business's domain owner, we decide on a refund case by case.
You give EABD a non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to display, index, translate and quote your listing for as long as it exists, so that we can run the platform. That includes letting our AI features read and summarise it. You can take your content down at any time by archiving or deleting the listing. Some anonymised totals, such as search counts and ranking history, may stay in our analytics afterwards.
6. Verification
"Verified" on EABD means that, at the time we checked, we confirmed the business registration, the physical address and the contact email. It is a snapshot, not a continuing guarantee. If a business changes hands, moves or closes, its badge may be out of date until we check again. EABD does not promise that any business on the platform, verified or not, will do the work it offers, deliver the goods it lists or keep its promises to you.
7. Reviews and other content you post
A review must describe a genuine experience with the business. Do not review a business you own, work for or were paid to review, or one you have never dealt with. Do not post anything defamatory or harassing, or anything containing other people's personal data. Our team checks reviews before they go live. Businesses can reply in public but cannot delete reviews. EABD may remove a review that breaks these terms, and you can appeal by writing to [email protected].
8. Plans, payments and refunds
Every listing starts on the Free plan. Paid plans and their prices are shown on our pricing page. Some plans are a one-time payment that never expires, and others are paid once a year. We also sell one-off items such as promotions, category sponsorships, event tickets and award votes. Prices are in Kenyan shillings unless we say otherwise. Payments are handled by M-Pesa, Pesapal and PayPal, by bank transfer, or from your EABD Wallet, and EABD never stores full card numbers.
Nothing renews automatically. We never charge you without your action. When an annual plan is close to ending, we email you 14 days and 3 days before the end date with an invoice you can pay from your dashboard. If you do not pay, the listing moves back to the Free plan's features after a short grace period.
Refunds. Plans, promotions and sponsorships cannot be refunded once they are active, unless the law requires it. Event tickets follow the refund policy the organiser shows on the event page before you buy. Award votes cannot be refunded because they are counted when you pay. If something fails because of a problem on our side, contact us and we will put it right. Anything paid from an EABD Wallet that we refund goes back into the wallet.
EABD Wallet
An EABD Wallet holds money your business pays in ahead, so it can pay for EABD's services at once, without waiting for a bank transfer each time. It is credit for EABD's own services only: it is not a bank account, it earns no interest, and money in it cannot be sent to another user or business.
- Opening one. You give us your business's details and our team checks them once. Money paid in becomes available only after that check.
- Adding money. The smallest deposit is KES 50,000, or the same in your own currency or in US dollars. Your dashboard shows the most you can add at once and hold. You can pay by bank transfer, M-Pesa, card or mobile money (Pesapal) or PayPal, in the currency you choose. Two members of our team check every deposit; it is available once both have confirmed it, normally within one working day of the money reaching us. We credit the full amount you sent, even when banks on the way take charges.
- Currencies. Money stays in the currency you paid in. When a price is in another currency, we convert it at our current rate, rounded up, and show you the amount before you confirm.
- Paying from the wallet. Every payment needs your account password and a code we email to your registered address, and your authenticator code when two-step sign-in is on, for large payments and from a new browser. The wallet pays only for your own business's items, up to its daily limit, and never for award votes.
- Keeping it safe. Keep your email account and your EABD password safe: anyone with both could use your wallet. For your protection we pause payments and money back for 72 hours after a password reset, a change of email address or two-step sign-in being switched off. You can freeze your wallet at any time from your dashboard or from any wallet email, and we may freeze it when something looks wrong, telling you why.
- Money back. You can ask for unspent money back at any time. Our administrators pay it back to where it came from (the account that sent it, or the same card, PayPal account or M-Pesa number), normally within 10 working days. Money added in the last 14 days waits until that time has passed. Outgoing bank charges are taken from the amount sent.
- Credit from EABD. Credit we give you, including sourcing credit, pays for any EABD service, is used before your own money, expires 12 months after it was given and is never paid out.
- Reversed deposits. If a bank, card issuer or payment provider reverses a deposit after it was spent, we may pause what it paid for until the amount is settled.
- Deposits we cannot accept. We may refuse money sent by someone other than your business, and we report what the law requires us to report.
- Our bank details never change by email. Pay only into the account shown in your dashboard and on our deposit advice. We never ask you by email, phone or WhatsApp to pay into a different account; if anyone does, do not pay and tell us at [email protected].
- Closing it. Ask for your money back, then close the wallet from your dashboard. Credit from EABD ends when it closes. If a wallet is not used for 12 months we remind you of its balance, and we follow the law on unclaimed money.
9. EABD Sourcing
EABD Sourcing lets a business on a paid plan send a request for quotes to matching suppliers, and lets suppliers on a paid plan answer it. Today a request costs KES 1,000 and sending a quote costs KES 200. Fees can change from season to season, and the price shown when you pay is the price you pay. Each plan includes a monthly number of requests and quotes.
- If nobody quotes. When a request closes without a single quote, the buyer's fee comes back as credit in their EABD Wallet, usable on any EABD service. A fee paid from money in the wallet goes back to the wallet as money.
- Anonymity. Suppliers see the buyer's industry and town, its EABD plan and the year it joined EABD, and how many of its past requests it awarded to a supplier, but not the buyer's name or contacts, until the buyer chooses to share them with one supplier. We remove phone numbers, emails and links from what buyers and suppliers write.
- Checks. Our team may review a request before it goes out, and may decline requests that break these terms.
- Quotes. Suppliers must quote honestly, for goods and work they can actually provide, and say whether a price is firm or indicative. A supplier can revise a quote for free until the buyer opens it.
- Ordering. Quotes are ordered by value and trust as explained on our How we rank page. What a supplier pays EABD can move its quote up only among comparable suppliers, never above a stronger one, and the "Best value" order ignores payments to EABD altogether.
- Your agreement is with each other. Any contract for goods or services is between the buyer and the supplier. EABD is not a party to it and does not guarantee payment, delivery or quality.
- Fair use. Do not use requests only to collect prices with no intention of buying, and do not use quotes to contact buyers outside EABD before they have shared their details.
10. Email outreach
Businesses on the Premium plan can send email campaigns to businesses listed on EABD. If you send a campaign, you agree to these rules.
- Send only lawful business messages that are relevant to the businesses you choose to reach.
- Be honest about who you are and what you offer. Do not use misleading subject lines or pretend to be someone else.
- Do not send anything illegal, offensive, deceptive or harmful, and do not ask recipients for passwords or payment details.
- Respect your plan's monthly sending limit.
EABD adds your business name as the sender and an unsubscribe link to every email. Anyone who unsubscribes or complains will not receive campaigns again. You will not see recipients' email addresses unless they reply to you. We may pause or stop a campaign that draws complaints or bounces, or that breaks these rules, and repeated misuse can end your access to outreach.
11. AI features
EABD uses AI to answer searches, power the assistant, summarise profiles and help businesses draft emails. AI can be wrong. Treat its answers as a starting point, check anything important with the business itself, and do not rely on them as legal, financial or professional advice. If you send or publish text that the AI drafted for you, you are responsible for it.
12. What you must not do
Do not use EABD to list a business that does not exist or that you cannot represent. Do not post content that is illegal, fraudulent or defamatory, or that infringes someone else's intellectual property. Do not harass or threaten anyone, or spam other users through our messages or campaigns. Do not scrape the platform faster than we allow (see section 15), reverse engineer it, get around our rate limits or security, or pretend to be another person or organisation.
13. Intellectual property
The EABD platform belongs to us, including its design, code, brand, search algorithms and verification method. You keep ownership of your listing content, and nothing in these terms transfers our intellectual property to you. The EABD name and logo are trade marks, so please do not use them without our written permission.
14. Takedown notices
If you believe content on EABD infringes your copyright, trade mark or another right, write to [email protected]. Tell us which work you believe is infringed, the EABD page that shows it and how to reach you, and confirm in good faith that the use is not authorised. We act on credible notices within five business days and pass them on to the business concerned so that it can respond.
15. Crawling, scraping and the API
You may crawl public EABD pages at a reasonable rate that respects our robots.txt. You may use the API only with a valid token and within the published rate limits. You must not bulk export the database and resell it. Educational and research projects are welcome, so write to us first and we will help rather than block you.
16. Ending your use of EABD
You may delete your account at any time. We may suspend or close an account that breaks these terms. We will tell you why and give you a chance to fix the problem, unless it is serious enough to need immediate action, such as fraud, illegal content or a threat to someone's safety. Closing an account does not entitle you to a refund of unused plan time. Sections that should reasonably continue after an account closes, such as intellectual property, indemnity, limits of liability and governing law, still apply.
17. Disclaimers
EABD is provided "as is" and "as available". We do not promise that the platform will always be available, free of errors or safe from every possible attack. We do not guarantee that any listing, review, quote or AI answer is accurate, complete or right for your purpose. To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim all implied warranties.
18. Limits of our liability
To the fullest extent the law allows, EABD's total liability to you under these terms is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, or ten thousand Kenyan shillings. We are not liable for indirect, consequential or special losses, such as lost profits, lost data or lost business opportunities, even if we knew they were possible. Nothing here limits liability that the law does not allow us to limit, such as liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, or for fraud.
19. Indemnity
You agree to cover EABD, its directors, staff and contractors against any claim, loss, damage or expense, including reasonable legal fees, that arises from your breach of these terms or your misuse of the platform.
20. Changes to these terms
We may update these terms. For important changes, we email the address on your account at least 14 days before they take effect. If you keep using EABD after that date, you accept the new terms. If you do not accept them, please stop using EABD before they take effect.
21. Governing law and disputes
These terms are governed by the laws of Kenya, without regard to conflict of law rules. If a dispute cannot be settled through good faith negotiation, it will go to arbitration in Nairobi under the rules of the Nairobi Centre for International Arbitration (NCIA). There will be one arbitrator, chosen by the parties or appointed by the NCIA if the parties cannot agree. The arbitration will be held in English, and each party pays its own costs unless the arbitrator decides otherwise.
22. Events beyond our control
Neither side is liable for failing to perform because of events beyond reasonable control, such as natural disasters, war, civil unrest, government action, internet outages or pandemics. The affected side must give notice promptly and do what it reasonably can to limit the impact.
23. The whole agreement
If a court finds any part of these terms unenforceable, the rest stays in force and that part is replaced with the closest enforceable wording. These terms, together with our Privacy Policy and any plan terms you accepted at checkout, are the entire agreement between you and EABD on this subject.
24. Legal notices
Send formal legal notices to [email protected], with a copy by registered post to the address on our Contact page. We treat the email as the notice itself and the posted copy as confirmation.
