Haleon's Basin Champion Partnership — A Corporate Top-Up to the Upper Tana-Nairobi Water Fund

In June 2026, consumer-health company Haleon announced a three-year 'Basin Champion' partnership with the Upper Tana-Nairobi Water Fund Trust, a multi-stakeholder trust The Nature Conservancy helped establish in 2015. The partnership will work with 7,660 smallholder farmers in the Upper Tana catchment — which supplies about 95 percent of Nairobi's water and around half of Kenya's hydropower — to restore and improve management of 131 hectares of farmland and 1.5 kilometres of riparian corridor through agroforestry, soil-conservation terraces, grass strips, riparian buffer restoration and farmer training.

The stated target is roughly 76,000 cubic metres of additional water replenishment a year by the partnership's third year, measured using the Volumetric Water Benefit Accounting method combined with Curve Number hydrological modelling — an established water-fund accounting approach rather than a bespoke or unverifiable metric. The partnership is explicitly framed around Haleon's own water-neutrality goal for its Nairobi operations, making it a corporate top-up to an existing, longer-running watershed PES scheme rather than a new fund from scratch; as with any single-corporate-sponsor commitment, the 76,000 m3 figure is a three-year target rather than an audited result.

Read the full analysis: https://www.the-star.co.ke/counties/nairobi/2026-06-27-new-partnership-to-replenish-76000m3-of-nairobis-water