Teachers applying to South Africa’s independent schools can now be screened against information on the open, deep and dark web, with their data processed in the United Kingdom and a report going to the school rather than to them.
Safehire.ai has partnered with the Independent Schools Association of Southern Africa (ISASA) and TPN Credit Bureau to offer what it calls Digital Risk Screening to schools. Its chief executive, Simon Holden, answered tech.africa’s questions in writing on how the checks work under the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA).
What a school gets
The service searches lawfully accessible open-source information, uses AI to triage what it finds, and has analysts trained in military intelligence review anything potentially adverse before a report goes to the school, in as little as 24 hours. It is meant to sit alongside police clearance, sex-offender register checks and references, not replace them.
Every ISASA member school gets its first search free and preferential pricing after that. Holden said more than 800 member schools are in the programme, but he declined to call them users: “that would overstate where we are at this early stage.” TPN, already a screening provider to South African schools, is building the service into its own platform. Safehire did not disclose what a search costs after the free one.
The school carries the legal risk
Under POPIA, the school is the responsible party and Safehire the operator. Safehire does not decide, search by search, whether a school has a lawful basis to screen someone.
Its terms require one, along with a transparency notice and consent where needed, and oblige the school to keep a record of why each search was run. Safehire says it can refuse or suspend a search it considers a material legal or safeguarding risk.
In a normal recruitment process, Holden said, he would expect candidates to know they are being screened, and that their data will be processed in the UK. He stopped short of making that absolute: “POPIA does contain exceptions and some nuance around the timing of notification,” he said, “so I would not say prior notification is an absolute rule in every possible circumstance.”
What the candidate sees
Not the report, by default. “Safehire does not automatically send a separate copy directly to the candidate,” Holden said.
Candidates can use their POPIA rights of access and correction through the school, and Safehire is contractually bound to help schools answer those requests. A finding, he added, “should never simply become an automated rejection”, and a school should give the person a chance to respond.
Safehire says it does not hack accounts, bypass logins, scrape private social media or buy illicit material. Information about someone’s sex life or sexual orientation is suppressed from normal reporting unless there is a documented lawful reason tied to the screening purpose. “Holding a political view is not a safeguarding risk,” Holden said, and an allegation of crime is not treated as proof.
What is not yet known
Safehire does not publish how often its analysts reject what the machines flag. “I would rather be transparent about that than manufacture an impressive-looking statistic,” Holden said.
His point is that a rejected flag never reaches the school, so nothing has to be withdrawn.
On the transfer abroad, Safehire relies mainly on contractual terms offering protection “substantially similar” to POPIA, one of the grounds section 72 of the Act allows. Where personal data is processed has become a live question across the continent, from Nigeria’s argument over local cloud to Egypt’s new real-time lending data rules.
Safehire was founded by Holden, a former school bursar, and Sean Lumley, a South African-born co-founder of the risk company CybSafe, and has raised about $2 million (£1.55 million) in seed funding.
What the programme amounts to will depend on how many of ISASA’s schools actually use it, and on whether candidates, told or not, ever ask to see what was found.
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