Terms of Service

Version 1.0. Effective 26 September 2026.

1. Who we are

Panya Routes is provided by Panya Routes Limited, a private company registered in Kenya, with its registered office in Nanyuki, Kenya ("Panya", "we", "us").

Contact: support@panyaroutes.com. Website: https://panyaroutes.com.

These terms are an agreement between you and Panya Routes Limited. They cover the Panya Routes mobile app, the website at panyaroutes.com, and any link we send you to follow a live share or join a convoy (together, "the service"). Sponsors also accept the separate Sponsor Terms.

Please read these terms with our Privacy Policy, which explains how we handle your personal data.

2. What Panya is

Panya helps drivers and walkers find routes across Kenya, understand what a route asks of them, download it, and navigate it with no signal. Each published route carries a terrain grade or foot grade, a commitment band, facts, photographs and the evidence our team gathered before publishing it. If you add a vehicle to your garage, a driving route also shows a vehicle verdict for that vehicle.

Panya is an information and navigation tool. We do not build, own, maintain, patrol or control any road, track, path, crossing, park, conservancy or private land shown in the service. We do not run tours, provide guides, supply vehicles or provide rescue.

3. Accounts

You can browse without an account. Public routes can be viewed without signing in.

Signing in. To save routes, keep a garage, contribute photographs or hazard reports, use live share or convoy, and use other account features, you need an account. You sign in with your email address. We email you a one-time code, with a link that does the same job if you would rather not type it. We do not use passwords, SMS codes, or sign-in through another company's account.

Age and acceptance. You must be 18 or older to create or use an account. Before we send a sign-in code, you confirm "I am 18 or older, and I accept the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy". We record which version of these terms and of the Privacy Policy you accepted, and when.

Your email account is your key. Anyone who can read your email can sign in as you. Keep your email account secure. You are responsible for activity under your Panya account. If you think someone else has access, write to support@panyaroutes.com at once.

Accurate details. Give us a working email address. The display name and profile you choose must not impersonate anyone.

Staff and sponsor accounts. Operator (owner, editor, moderator) and sponsor accounts are created by a Panya owner. They cannot be created by signing in, and they carry extra obligations set out in separate staff rules and the Sponsor Terms.

4. Routes, grades and verdicts are guidance, not a promise

Read this section carefully. It limits what you can rely on.

What the information is. Terrain grades, foot grades, drive categories, the commitment band, the vehicle verdict, distances, durations, elevation, fuel and town distances, weather forecasts, facts, photographs and hazard reports are our best assessment from route geometry, public map data, field evidence reviewed by our team, and reports from other users. Each route shows when it was published and reviewed.

What it is not. It is not a promise that a route is open, passable, legal to use, or safe on the day you travel. It is not a survey, an inspection, or a guarantee of road or track condition.

Conditions change. Rain can make a murram road impassable overnight. A river crossing can rise within hours. Bridges wash out, gates close, tracks are rerouted, and security situations change. A route that was accurate when we reviewed it can be wrong when you arrive. Hazard reports from other users may be late, wrong or missing.

The vehicle verdict compares the capability you entered for your vehicle (drivetrain, ground clearance, tyres, lockers, winch, snorkel and similar) with the demands we recorded for the route. It depends on what you entered being correct, and on your vehicle being in good working order. It does not account for your load, tyre pressure, fuel, driver skill, weather, or the condition of the route on the day. A "yes" verdict does not mean your vehicle will get through.

The commitment band describes how hard it would be to get help or get out if something goes wrong: distance to a bail-out point, to a town, to fuel, duration and climb. It is a planning aid, not a measure of danger or a rescue plan.

Walking routes carry a foot grade and never a vehicle verdict.

Your decision. You decide whether to start a route, whether to continue, and when to turn back. Look at the ground in front of you, not only the screen. Do not rely on Panya as your only source of navigation or safety information on a remote route. Carry a paper map or a second means of navigation where the route calls for it.

5. Your safety and the risks you accept

Driving off sealed roads and walking in remote country carry real risk of injury, death, vehicle damage, getting stuck, getting lost, and delay. These risks exist whatever information you have. By using a route you accept the risks that come with driving or walking it.

You are responsible for:

• the roadworthiness, insurance, licensing and legal compliance of your vehicle, and your own fitness and licence to drive it;
• obeying the Traffic Act and every other law that applies to you, road signs, speed limits and instructions from police, rangers and landowners;
• carrying enough fuel, water, food, spares, recovery gear, first aid and communications for the route and for delay;
• telling someone your plan and when to expect you;
• checking the weather, river levels and local conditions before you set out;
• the safety of your passengers, companions and anyone walking with you;
• never using the app in a way that distracts you from driving. Set up navigation before you move, or have a passenger operate it. Obey the law on using a phone while driving.

Vehicle damage and recovery. You are responsible for any damage to your vehicle and for the cost of towing, recovery, repair, accommodation or transport that follows. Panya does not arrange or pay for recovery. Check what your insurance covers before you drive off-road; many policies exclude it.

6. Protected areas, park fees, private land and access

Some routes pass through or near national parks, reserves, forests, conservancies, community land, or private land.

• Access is your responsibility. A route appearing in Panya does not mean you have permission to use it. Before you enter, check that the route is open to you and get any permission the landowner, community or authority requires.
• Fees and rules. You must pay any entry, conservation, camping, vehicle or guide fee charged by the Kenya Wildlife Service, the Kenya Forest Service, a county government, a conservancy or a landowner, and follow their rules, including rules on off-road driving, speed, wildlife, fires, camping and hours of entry. Fees and rules shown in Panya may be out of date; the authority's current rules apply.
• Stay on the track. Do not create new tracks or drive off established tracks where this is not allowed.
• Respect communities. Respect local residents, livestock, crops, gates and water points.

We are not responsible for any fine, penalty, fee, removal or dispute that follows from entering land or a protected area.

7. The SOS screen is not an emergency service

The SOS screen shows your current position and the Kenyan emergency numbers 999, 112 and 1199 so that you can call for help and read your position to the person who answers.

• Panya is not an emergency service. Panya does not contact the police, an ambulance, a rescue service or anyone else for you. The SOS screen sends nothing on its own. You must make the call yourself.
• Phone signal may be weak or absent on many routes. The position shown depends on your phone's GPS and may be inaccurate.
• Emergency numbers and the organisations behind them are outside our control. We cannot promise that any number will connect or that help will come in time.

8. Live share and convoy

Live share lets you create a link that shows your live position to anyone who opens it while the share is active. Convoy lets people driving the same route share their positions with each other after joining through an invite link.

• You choose whether to start a live share or join a convoy. Anyone who has a live-share link can see your latest position while the share is active, with or without a Panya account. We do not know or record who you sent it to, so pass it only to people you trust.
• A live share lasts at most 24 hours. It ends when it expires or when you stop it, and your position is cleared from our servers when it ends.
• A convoy lasts at most 24 hours. It shows every member's latest position to the other members while it is active. Leaving a convoy stops sharing your position with it.
• Live share and convoy depend on phone signal and on each device. Positions can be late, wrong, or missing. Do not use them as a safety system, a tracking service for a person at risk, or a substitute for agreeing a plan with your companions.
• Do not use live share or convoy to track anyone without their knowledge or consent.

9. Content you contribute

"Your content" means anything you submit to the service, including route photographs, hazard reports, condition reports, profile text and your profile photograph.

You keep ownership of your content.

Licence to us. You grant Panya Routes Limited a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, transferable and sub-licensable licence to host, store, copy, reproduce, resize, crop, adapt, translate, publish, display and distribute your content, for the purposes of operating, improving and promoting the service, including in route pages, maps, the website, app store listings and social media posts about Panya. Sub-licences are limited to our service providers and to partners who display Panya content on our behalf. The licence lasts as long as your content stays in the service, and for a reasonable period afterwards to clear it from backups and from promotional material already published. It survives deletion of your account for content that another person has already relied on or that we have already published in promotional material.

Moral rights. Where the law gives you a right to be named as the author of your content, or to object to its distortion, you agree that we may display your content without naming you, may crop, resize, compress or re-colour it for display, and may place it next to other material. We will not alter it in a way that changes what it shows or is prejudicial to your honour or reputation. Where a route photograph is credited, we will use the display name on your profile at the time of publication.

Your promises. For each item of your content you confirm that:

• you created it, or you have the right to grant the licence above;
• it is accurate to the best of your knowledge. A hazard report describes something you saw or reliably know;
• it was taken where you were allowed to be;
• it does not show a person who can be identified, unless they agreed, and it does not show a vehicle number plate, a child's face, or a home in a way that identifies the people who live there;
• it breaks no law and no one else's rights.

Moderation.

• Route photographs are reviewed by a moderator before they appear. An approved photograph is published with the position the app recorded for it, and it can be taken down later. A taken-down photograph leaves public view at once.
• Hazard reports appear on the route as soon as you file them, so that other drivers are warned quickly. Moderators can take a report down at any time. A report leaves the public listing after 30 days and is deleted 90 days after it was filed.
• Before anyone other than you sees a photograph, we remove the location, device and capture-time data stored inside the image file.
• We may decline, hide, take down or remove any content at our discretion, including content that is inaccurate, out of date, unsafe, unlawful, or against these terms. We do not have to publish anything you submit.

Routes are published by Panya. Only Panya staff author and publish routes in the catalogue. Submitting content does not make you a route author, and your private data (such as a garage or a live-share position) never becomes a public route.

10. Acceptable use

When you use Panya you must not:

• break the law, or help anyone else break it, including laws on road use, protected areas, trespass, wildlife, and data protection;
• submit false hazard reports, fake photographs, or content meant to mislead drivers about a route's condition or difficulty;
• post content that is abusive, threatening, hateful, sexual, violent, defamatory or discriminatory, or that incites violence, including content prohibited under the Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes Act, 2018;
• harass, stalk or track any person, including through live share or convoy links;
• share another person's personal data without their consent;
• impersonate a person, a Panya staff member or a sponsor;
• scrape, crawl, bulk download, copy or resell route data, grades, evidence, photographs or other content, except to use a route yourself as the app allows (for example, a GPX export for your own trip);
• use Panya content to build or train a competing product or dataset;
• reverse engineer, decompile or interfere with the app or its servers, except where the law allows this despite this restriction;
• probe, scan or test the security of the service without our written permission, or get around any limit or access control, including the daily limits on how many hazard reports, photographs, comments, reports of other users' content and route plans one account can send;
• upload malware or overload the service;
• use the service for advertising or commercial promotion outside the Sponsor Terms.

11. Account standing: active, suspended, banned

Every account has a standing.

• Active. You can use every feature available to your account.
• Suspended. We may suspend an account while we look into a problem, or as a consequence of breaking these terms. Every suspension has an end date, at most 90 days after it starts, and we may lift it earlier. A suspension signs the account out of every device. You can sign in again, but the account is read-only until the suspension ends: you can browse, read what you saved, download your data and see your account standing, but you cannot post, save, contribute, share your position or change anything else.
• Banned. We may ban an account for serious or repeated breaches, for unlawful conduct, or where it is needed to protect other users. A banned account cannot sign in. Public routes can still be browsed without signing in.

A staff member records the reason for every suspension or ban. A signed-in account can see its standing, the reason and the dates in the app under Settings, then Account standing. A banned account can still ask for a copy of its data, or ask to be deleted, by writing to support@panyaroutes.com. We keep the history of standing decisions after an account is deleted, as set out in the Privacy Policy.

We decide standing on the facts and act in proportion to what happened. Where it is safe and lawful, we will tell you what we did and why. If you think we got it wrong, appeal within 30 days of the decision:

• Suspended accounts appeal in the app under Settings, then Account standing. You can send one appeal for each decision, and the answer is shown there.
• Banned accounts appeal by writing to support@panyaroutes.com.

A member of staff reads every appeal with your account's history and answers it, where possible someone other than the person who made the decision. An appeal does not change your standing by itself; if we agree with you, we lift or change the restriction.

12. Ending your account

You can leave at any time. You can delete your account in the app under Settings, after confirming with a fresh sign-in code. Deletion happens straight away and cannot be undone. Before you delete, you can download a copy of your data in the app under Settings, then Download your data. While your account is suspended or banned, write to support@panyaroutes.com and we will delete it for you. Staff and sponsor accounts cannot be deleted in the app; write to us, and note that records they created for the business, such as published routes, reviews and invoices, are kept. What happens to your data after deletion is set out in the Privacy Policy.

We can end your account if you seriously or repeatedly break these terms, if we must by law, or if we stop providing the service. Where we end the service as a whole, we will give you at least 30 days' notice in the app or by email, where we can, so that you can download your data.

Sections 4, 5, 6, 7, 9 (licence for content already relied on or published), 13, 14, 16 and 17 continue after your account ends.

13. Our intellectual property

The app, the website, the Panya name and marks, and the route catalogue (including route descriptions, grades, commitment bands, evidence, photographs we own or licence, and the way the catalogue is arranged) belong to Panya Routes Limited or our licensors. We give you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to use the service for your own non-commercial trip planning and navigation, in line with these terms.

Some map and geographic data comes from open sources with their own licences, including OpenStreetMap contributors (Open Database Licence), GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) and elevation data from NASA and USGS SRTM. Our attributions page at https://panyaroutes.com/legal/attributions lists them. Nothing in these terms limits your rights under those licences. Map display is provided by Mapbox under its own terms.

14. The service as provided

We work to keep the service accurate and running, but:

• the service is provided as it is and as available;
• we do not promise that it will be uninterrupted, free of errors, or available in any place, or that offline downloads, navigation, forecasts, live share or convoy will work on your device at any given time;
• we may change, add or remove features, and we may withdraw a route from the catalogue at any time, for example if we learn it is no longer safe or accessible.

Nothing in these terms removes a right or remedy you have as a consumer under the Consumer Protection Act, 2012 or any other law that cannot be excluded by agreement. Where the law implies a term that cannot be excluded, that term applies.

15. Payments

Panya does not charge drivers or walkers and does not sell paid features or take payments in the mobile app. If this changes, we will publish the price and the terms before you pay. Sponsors pay under the Sponsor Terms.

16. Limits on our liability

This section applies only to the extent Kenyan law allows. It does not limit or exclude:

• liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence;
• liability for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation;
• any liability or consumer right that cannot be limited or excluded under the Consumer Protection Act, 2012 or other Kenyan law.

Subject to that:

• Routes and conditions. We are not liable for loss, injury, damage, cost or delay that arises from the condition of any road, track, path, crossing or land, from weather, from wildlife, from the acts of other people, or from your decision to start or continue a route, including where route information, a grade, a verdict, a commitment band, a forecast or a hazard report was out of date or wrong, unless the loss was caused by our negligence or breach of these terms.
• Indirect loss. We are not liable for loss of profit, business, income, opportunity or data, or for any indirect or consequential loss.
• Cap. Because the service is free to drivers and walkers, our total liability to you for all claims connected with the service in any twelve-month period is limited to KES 10,000.
• Third-party services. We are not liable for services we do not control, including emergency services, phone networks, app stores, map providers and the websites of parks or authorities.

17. Your responsibility to us (indemnity)

If you use the service for a business, or break these terms deliberately or through serious carelessness, you agree to cover our reasonable losses and costs (including reasonable legal fees) from any claim by a third party that arises from your content, your breach of these terms, or your breach of the law or someone else's rights. We will tell you about the claim promptly and let you take part in the defence. This section does not apply to loss caused by our own breach or negligence, and it does not make you pay for anything a consumer cannot be made to pay under Kenyan law.

18. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms when the service or the law changes. Each version carries a version number and an effective date, and we keep a record of which version you accepted.

• For a change that matters to your rights, we will tell you in the app at least 14 days before it takes effect, and we may ask you to accept the new terms before you continue to use account features.
• Smaller changes (such as corrections or clearer wording) take effect when published.
• If you do not agree with a change, you can stop using the service and delete your account before the change takes effect.

19. Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of Kenya.

If you have a problem, write to support@panyaroutes.com first. We will reply within 14 days and try to settle it with you.

If we cannot settle it within 30 days, either of us may propose mediation before a mediator agreed between us, or failing agreement, appointed by the Nairobi Centre for International Arbitration. Mediation is optional. Taking part does not stop either of us from going to court, and does not stop time running for any claim.

The courts of Kenya have jurisdiction over any dispute. This does not affect your right to complain to the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner about personal data, or to any consumer body, or to use the Small Claims Court where it has jurisdiction.

20. General

• Whole agreement. These terms, the Privacy Policy, and (for sponsors) the Sponsor Terms are the whole agreement between you and us about the service.
• Transfer. We may transfer our rights and duties under these terms to another company as part of a reorganisation or sale of the business, and we will tell you if we do. You may not transfer your account.
• Severability. If a court finds part of these terms unenforceable, the rest still applies.
• No waiver. If we do not enforce a term straight away, we can still enforce it later.
• Language. These terms are written in English. If we publish a translation, the English version applies where they differ.
• Notices. We send notices to the email address on your account or show them in the app. You send notices to support@panyaroutes.com.

21. Contact

• Panya Routes Limited, Nanyuki, Kenya
• Support: support@panyaroutes.com
• Privacy: privacy@panyaroutes.com