Nile Breweries–WWF River Rwizi Catchment Restoration (Uganda)

Since 2019, Nile Breweries Limited (part of AB InBev) has partnered with WWF Uganda and Uganda's Ministry of Water and Environment (Victoria Water Management Zone) to restore the River Rwizi catchment, an 8,200 km² basin serving roughly 2.5 million people in southwestern Uganda, including Nile Breweries' own Mbarara brewery. The Shs 2 billion (~US$530,000) programme, now in its third phase, combines catchment mapping, riverbank demarcation and soil and water conservation with alternative livelihoods for communities that previously depended on cultivating the riverbank.

By 2024, the partners had mapped and demarcated 270 hectares of degraded riverbank along a 27 km stretch of the river running through Mbarara city, of which 80.3 hectares had been physically restored using live boundary markers and bamboo buffer planting. A separate 2025 phase restored and demarcated 15 km (84 hectares) of the Kibaale wetland, a major tributary in the Kakigani micro-catchment, installing 22 rainwater-harvesting tanks (10,000-litre capacity each) serving roughly 1,000 people, alongside two downstream water-quality monitoring stations.

1,076 households have adopted soil-conservation trenches to reduce erosion and sedimentation, and 114 people from the basin's 12 districts were trained in a 2024 scaling-up workshop. Community livelihood alternatives — beekeeping, small livestock and a revolving fund — aim to reduce dependence on the riverbank itself. Independent local reporting confirms the restored hectarage and budget figures, though no independently audited water-quality or streamflow dataset has yet been published to verify the claimed improvements in water quality and flood mitigation.

Read the full analysis: https://www.nilebreweries.com/nile-breweries-limited-restores-part-of-the-kibaale-wetland-to-safeguard-river-rwizi-and-boost-community-livelihoods