Nestlé Nigeria — AWS 'Core' Certification and Undisclosed Compliance Gaps at the Abaji Bottling Plant (Upper Niger Basin)

Nestlé Nigeria Plc's Abaji Factory, opened in April 2016 in the Federal Capital Territory, bottles Nestlé Pure Life water from two deep wells in the Upper Niger River Basin. In November 2023, independent certifier Water Stewardship Assurance Services (WSAS, UK) audited the site against the Alliance for Water Stewardship (AWS) Standard v2.0 and recommended 'Certified Core' status, valid to October 2026.

The audit confirms the site holds a water-abstraction licence capped at 534,360 m³/year (maximum 0.017 m³/s) and tracks abstraction against that limit, with its self-reported water balance assessed as positive. Nestlé engaged more than a dozen stakeholder groups, including the Fadama Farmers' Cooperative and the Manderegi Women's Group, and had recently commissioned a new effluent-treatment plant.

The same audit recorded 26 findings, including three major non-conformities: laboratory results from January to December 2022 repeatedly showed yeast, turbidity, elevated TDS, nitrate and coliform exceedances in influent, effluent and the adjacent Manderegi stream that were neither investigated by the site nor disclosed to Nigerian regulators; the site's documentation on WASH adequacy in the catchment dated to 2006–2011; and the site had mis-scoped its own catchment, focusing on a groundwater sub-catchment rather than the full Upper Niger River Basin as required by the standard.

The report is a useful counterweight to celebratory corporate water-stewardship narratives: independent audit produced a certification, yet the underlying findings show a real gap between the company's public commitments and its own disclosed compliance record — the kind of evidence-based, warts-and-all case this catalogue aims to surface rather than exclude.

Read the full analysis: https://www.thisdaylive.com/2025/10/30/nestle-nigeria-leads-the-drive-for-quality-water-nationwide/