Terms of service

1. This agreement

These terms are an agreement between you and African Food Network, of African Food Network, Owena House, 76 Ralph Shodeinde Street, Central Business District, FCT Abuja, Nigeria.

By using afrifoodnetwork.com, creating an account or submitting a recipe, you accept them. If you do not accept them, please do not use the site.

2. Accounts

• You may hold one account, and the details on it must be accurate.
• You are responsible for keeping your password to yourself and for what happens under your account.
• Tell us at info@afrifoodnetwork.com if you believe someone else has access to it.
• You may close your account at any time. Section 5 explains what happens to work you have already published.
• We may suspend or close an account that breaks these terms, and we will tell you why.
• You must be at least 16 to hold an account.

3. Africook status

Anyone may hold an account, read the archive, save recipes and comment. Submitting a recipe to the archive is different: it is open only to verified Africooks.

Africook status is granted by AFN and is not something an account holder can set for themselves. We grant it after reviewing an application. We may withdraw it if these terms or our Editorial Standards are broken, and we will explain why if we do.

Being an Africook is not employment, partnership or agency, and it carries no entitlement to payment unless AFN agrees one separately in writing.

4. What you contribute, and what you keep

You keep ownership of everything you submit. AFN does not take your copyright.

What you give us is permission to publish it. By submitting a recipe, article, photograph or comment you grant AFN a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to store, reproduce, publish, adapt for length and house style, translate, and display that contribution on the site and in AFN's own promotion of it, including at AFN events and on AFN's social channels.

This licence continues after your account closes, for material already published. That is what makes an archive an archive: a recipe that vanishes when someone leaves takes a piece of the record with it, and the readers who linked to it are left with a dead page. If you want your name taken off a published contribution, ask us and we will remove it.

You confirm that: - The contribution is yours, or you have permission to submit it. - Any photograph you upload is yours to license, and does not carry another publication's watermark or credit. - It does not infringe anyone's rights and is not unlawful.

5. Our promise to credit you

Every recipe and article we publish carries the name of the person who contributed it. This is not a courtesy we may withdraw; it is the argument the archive exists to make, and we bind ourselves to it here.

If we publish your contribution we will credit it to your display name, link it to your contributor profile where you have one, and keep that credit attached if the piece is edited, re-categorised or moved.

Where a contribution is substantially rewritten by AFN's editors, we will say so rather than leave your name on text you did not write.

6. Moderation, editing and removal

Everything submitted is reviewed before it appears. We may edit for clarity, length, house style, accuracy and safety. We may decline a submission, and we will give a reason.

We may remove or amend published material where it is inaccurate, unsafe, unlawful, infringing, or where a rights holder makes a valid complaint. Where we remove a page we will normally redirect its address rather than let the link die.

Comments are held for review before they appear.

7. A note on recipes and copyright

A list of ingredients is a statement of fact and is generally not protected by copyright on its own. The writing around it is: the headnote, the method as expressed, the heritage note, the photographs.

So we welcome a family recipe you have cooked for thirty years, told in your own words. We do not accept another publication's text, another cook's photographs, or a method copied from a book or website. If you learned a dish from a named source, tell us and we will credit it.

8. What you must not do

• Post anything unlawful, threatening, abusive, hateful, defamatory or deceptive.
• Impersonate another person, or submit work under a name that is not yours.
• Upload malicious code, scrape the site at a scale that degrades it, or try to reach parts of it you are not authorised to reach.
• Use the site to advertise, or to send unsolicited messages to other users.
• Submit recipes that are unsafe as written.

9. Cooking, allergies and your own judgement

Recipes on AFN are published for general information. They are not professional dietary, medical or food-safety advice.

You are responsible for the safety of what you cook and serve: for handling raw ingredients properly, for cooking to safe temperatures, and for checking every ingredient against the allergies and dietary needs of the people eating.

Dietary labels such as vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, dairy-free or halal are provided in good faith as a guide. They depend on the specific products you buy and on how the dish is prepared. Always read the label on the ingredients in front of you. If you have a serious allergy, do not rely on ours.

10. The site itself

The AFN name, logo, design, code and the arrangement of the archive belong to African Food Network or its licensors.

You may read, print and share links freely. You may not republish substantial parts of the archive, or use it to train a machine-learning model, without our written permission.

11. Liability

We work to keep the archive accurate and available, but we do not promise that it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that any recipe will work in your kitchen.

Nothing in these terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.

12. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, and the Nigerian courts have jurisdiction over any dispute.

If you are a consumer resident in the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area, nothing in this section takes away the protection of the mandatory consumer law of the country you live in, or your right to bring proceedings in your local courts.

13. Changes

We may change these terms. The version and date at the top of this page always show the current text, and we will tell account holders by email before a material change takes effect. Continuing to use the site after that means you accept the change.