Trustworthy School Records Without Constant Connectivity: Synchronization and Tamper-Evidence in the Indelo Architecture
School records in West Africa must survive conditions that most record-keeping software is not designed for: unreliable electricity, intermittent and expensive connectivity, campuses separated by hundreds of kilometres, and an institutional obligation to keep results and financial records credible for decades. This paper describes the synchronization and security methodology of Indelo, a school records platform engineered for that operating reality. Its central positions are that offline operation is the primary design case rather than a degraded fallback, and that tamper-evidence must survive distribution — the ability to prove that no record was silently altered must hold across teacher laptops, campus servers, and a head-office consolidation point that may rarely share a network. We describe a three-tier, file-first synchronization design in which write conflicts are eliminated by construction rather than resolved after the fact; a cryptographically chained package format whose verification never re-serializes data; an idempotent, interruption-safe import discipline; hash-chained academic and financial histories with reversal-only correction; frozen, versioned result snapshots whose presentation can be reconfigured without altering a byte of recorded truth; and a group-wide verification capability by which a head office can prove, per campus, that history was not rewritten. We report the evaluation discipline — every threat in the design's threat model is a named, executable test on two database engines — and we state the approach's honest limitations.
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