A fact that already exists, made askable.
Every Nigerian university, polytechnic and college of education already knows exactly who is enrolled. The problem was never the knowledge — it was that the only way to ask was a letter, a phone call to a registry that may be on strike, or a plastic card that proves nothing.
Two million students, and no way to answer one question.
A bank opening a student account, NELFUND assessing a loan, a telco pricing a data bundle and a landlord near a campus are all asking the same thing: is this person currently a student, and where. In 2026 the honest answer for most of them is that they take the applicant’s word for it, photograph an ID card and move on.
That has two costs. Students who are telling the truth queue at a registry for a letter that takes two weeks, or lose a concession because nobody could confirm them in time. And the concessions themselves keep running for years after graduation, because nothing ever tells the bank.
Bona exists to close that gap without moving the record. The institution keeps it. The student controls who sees it. Everybody else gets an answer in under a second.
We hold no financial history and score nobody. A verification is a fact, not a judgement.
No conduct records, no criminal data, no employment history. There is nowhere to put them.
Aggregate research access exists, is contracted separately and returns cohort statistics — never an individual record.
Bona holds a copy of one narrow slice, on your instruction, for as long as you say so.
Five positions we will be held to.
These are written down here rather than in an internal document because the whole point of publishing them is that changing one should be expensive.
Bona is a processor, not a registry. An institution can export everything it has given us and require its deletion, and we have to comply. We never become the authoritative source for a fact about a student — we become the fastest way to ask the institution that is.
Nothing beyond attestation moves without a live consent row, granted field by field and revocable without asking anyone. A student who cannot take permission back does not have permission — they have a terms of service.
There is no status picker anywhere in this product, for anyone, at any level of access. A completion date comes from entry date, programme duration, direct-entry credit and every declared strike and closure — and the arithmetic is visible to the student it describes.
No grades, no fees, no debt, no discipline, no attendance — absent from the schema, not filtered from responses. Tier 0 attestation is the cheapest call on our rate card because the least invasive question should also be the cheapest one to ask.
A student contesting a status, a registrar reviewing a re-validation and a bank auditing a lending decision are asking one question. The completion trace answers it with arithmetic and a circular reference, so nobody has to be believed.
Built in Lagos, for Nigeria first.
Bona Technologies Ltd, RC 7412886, registered in Nigeria and operating from Victoria Island, Lagos. Registered with the NDPC as a Data Controller of Major Importance. Data resident in Nigeria.
63 institutions live across the NUC, NBTE and NCCE registers, 4 more in onboarding, and 1.42 million enrolments held as at August 2026. Federal, state and private, because a network that only covers federal universities answers half the question.
The record first, then the institution portal, then students, then the API. Verification shipped last on purpose — an answer is only worth having if the dates behind it are right, and dates were the hard part.
We hire people who have queued at a registry.
Most of what makes this product correct is knowledge you cannot get from a spec: that a session label means different things at a polytechnic and a university, that a carry-over changes a completion date and a deferral does not, that a registry’s spreadsheet has merged cells in it. We hire for that as hard as we hire for engineering.
We are small, based in Lagos, and in the room with institutions most weeks. If that is the work you want, write to careers@bona.ng and tell us about a system you have seen fail people, and what you would have changed about it.
Onboarding takes about three weeks, most of it ours, and costs the institution nothing.