Yet beneath the glossy disclosures lies a more uncomfortable reality: ESG performance in Kenya remains uneven, difficult to verify independently, and heavily reliant on corporate self-reporting.
The critical question is no longer whether companies and public entities talk about ESG, but whether they can demonstrate tangible, verifiable impact.
Water, a material ESG risk for manufacturers, illustrates the tension between reported efficiency gains and local pressures.
EABL says it used about 650 million liters of water in FY25, improving efficiency from 2.90 to 2.84 liters per liter of beverage produced.
The company also claims to have replenished over 700 million liters while restoring more than two billion liters since 2020 through community and catchment projects.
While these numbers suggest progress, they also raise difficult questions: replenishment projects deliver benefits over long horizons, while water abstraction impacts are immediate and local.
Assessment framework
Kenya currently lacks a national framework to assess whether corporate “water positive” claims genuinely offset local stress at source, leaving communities and regulators dependent on corporate disclosures rather than basin-wide evaluations.
Safaricom’s environmental reporting highlights a parallel tension.
Despite heavy investment in energy efficiency and renewable power, total emissions increased in FY25, driven by network expansion, diesel use, and higher Scope 3 emissions.
Business growth, it seems, can easily overwhelm efficiency gains, a reality many Kenyan companies have yet to confront publicly.
Both EABL and Safaricom emphasize independent assurance as a pillar of ESG credibility.
EABL reports that key environmental metrics including water, energy, emissions, waste, and replenishment are externally verified alongside regulatory inspections, and describes assurance as confirming that reported data reflects operational reality rather than internal estimates.
Safaricom subjects its sustainability data to third-party assurance aligned with global frameworks such as GRI and IFRS Sustainability Standards, disclosing methodologies in its report.
Yet assurance has limits.
Most audits focus on data accuracy and adherence to standards rather than the ambition of targets or the inclusion of impacts outside reporting boundaries.
Assurance gap
Companies struggle to verify social and supply-chain impacts, particularly those involving informal labor, contractors, or community livelihoods, and often provide only partial assurance over them.
Civil society organizations describe an “assurance gap,” arguing that companies verify and trust what is easy to measure while sidelining harder-to-quantify impacts, leaving ESG reporting incomplete from a real-world perspective.
Plastic waste highlights another dimension of ESG tension.
EABL sells over 90 per cent of its beverages in returnable glass bottles and collects more than 35 million bottles annually, while it mitigates its 18,000-ton plastics footprint in FY25 by recovering and recycling just over half through partnerships with recyclers and informal collectors.
While progress is evident, nearly half of plastic packaging remains unrecovered, reliant on the informal waste sector, which operates with limited protections and volatile incomes.
Safaricom reports high recycling rates for e-waste and network materials but acknowledges that circular economy outcomes depend on consumer behavior, informal labor, and regulatory enforcement, factors over which corporates have influence but limited control.
Social and governance performance also reflects uneven accountability.
EABL says it sourced over 90 per cent of raw materials locally in FY25 and subjected high-risk Tier-1 suppliers to independent ESG audits, issuing corrective action plans for non-compliance and suspending some suppliers.
Safaricom details extensive supplier evaluations and ESG training but admits capacity gaps persist among smaller suppliers.
Across much of corporate Kenya, companies provide limited transparency on how often they ultimately exit suppliers, how long corrective actions take, and how much leverage buyers actually exercise in practice.
Process over outcome
Reporting tends to emphasize processes over outcomes, leaving investors and the public uncertain whether ESG enforcement meaningfully reshapes supply chains or simply manages risk exposure.
Governance is where ESG commitments are most clearly tested.
EABL reports board-level oversight through audit, risk, and governance committees and integration of ESG into enterprise risk management, yet does not disclose quantified links between ESG outcomes and executive pay.
Safaricom goes further, tying parts of executive performance evaluations to sustainability metrics, including climate and environmental targets.
This distinction matters as global investors increasingly view remuneration linkage as a signal of whether ESG is truly decisive or merely advisory.
Without hard incentives, sustainability risks may be discussed at length but weakly enforced.
The evidence from EABL and Safaricom suggests that Kenya’s ESG landscape is evolving but uneven.
Measurement, reporting, and assurance have improved, and some companies are increasingly transparent about trade-offs and setbacks.
At the same time, gaps persist around localized impacts, supply-chain accountability, and incentive structures.
ESG credibility in Kenya will increasingly depend not on polished commitments but on uncomfortable disclosures—where impacts occur, where targets are missed, and who is held accountable.
For readers, investors, and policymakers, the challenge is to look beyond the numbers and ask not just what is being reported, but what is still not being counted.
