invests in technical training, guaranteed offtake markets and partnerships. Communities gain reliable incomes while the company secures a resilient supply chain. Everyone has skin in the game.
Yet even the best designed sustainability strategy has its limits.
Some challenges are simply too big for any one organisation to solve. No matter how healthy your sustainability budget is, or how recognisable your brand could be, no single company can restore a watershed, regenerate landscapes or build climate resilience on its own. Operating in isolation fragments resources, duplicates effort and massively limits impact. The biggest sustainability challenges demand collective action.
Collective action recognises a simple reality: many sustainability challenges are shared challenges. Rivers do not recognise company boundaries. Neither do climate change, biodiversity loss or declining soil health. When one organisation invests in protecting a shared resource while others simply benefit, progress is slow and often unsustainable. However, when businesses, governments, development partners and communities invest together, resources are pooled, risks are shared and solutions can be implemented at the scale they were always intended to achieve.
One of the strongest examples I have seen is the Upper Tana Nairobi Water Fund Trust, Africa ' s first Water Fund. The Trust brings together organisations that might otherwise work independently, including East African Breweries PLC, Coca Cola, Haleon, Nairobi City Water and Sewerage Company and county governments across the Upper Tana watershed. Together they are investing in a shared objective: protecting the watershed that supplies approximately 95 % of Nairobi ' s water and supports about 65 % of Kenya ' s hydropower generation.
But what makes the Upper Tana model remarkable is not simply the number of organisations around the table. Collective action, on its own, is not enough. The real success lies in ensuring that everyone involved benefits from protecting the resource.
Consider the journey of a single drop of water. It begins upstream, where thousands of
19 MAL73 / 26 ISSUE farming families make daily decisions about are cultivated or soils are left exposed, rainfall washes sediment into rivers and reservoirs. Downstream, water quality declines, treatment costs rise, hydropower generation becomes less efficient and businesses begin to feel the consequences.
The Upper Tana model changes that equation. Rather than treating farmers as beneficiaries of corporate goodwill, it recognises them as essential partners in protecting the watershed. Through terracing, agroforestry, grass strips, riparian restoration, rainwater harvesting and other climate smart agricultural practices, farmers improve the productivity of their land while protecting the very ecosystems on which downstream communities and businesses depend.
One decision made on a farm in the Upper Tana can improve water quality for a household in Nairobi, reduce treatment costs for utilities and strengthen water security for industries that depend on a reliable supply. That is the power of connecting environmental restoration with economic opportunity. Farmers earn more. Businesses reduce risk. Utilities spend less treating water. Communities become more resilient. Nature recovers.
That is what makes the model so powerful. It demonstrates that environmental protection and economic development do not compete with one another. When sustainability is designed well, they reinforce each other.
Today, more than 260,000 smallholder farming families have become active partners in protecting the watershed. Through the programme, they are improving agricultural productivity while restoring the landscapes on which they depend. The results are measurable. More than 5.9 million trees are growing across the watershed. Water turbidity has reduced significantly, lowering treatment costs for downstream utilities, while healthier farms are creating stronger and more resilient rural livelihoods.
That, for me, is what " skin in the game " really means. Communities are no longer passive beneficiaries of corporate generosity. They become partners with a genuine stake in the outcome. Businesses stop funding projects simply because they look good in a report and start investing in solutions that strengthen both their operations and the communities around them.
People protect what protects them. As corporate leaders, sustainability professionals and policymakers gather at Kenya ' s Corporate Sustainability Leadership Forum on 23rd and 24th July 2026, and indeed many other forums convened on this theme, I hope the conversations move beyond compliance.
Reporting has an important role to play. It improves transparency, strengthens accountability and helps organisations understand where they stand. But reporting should never become the destination. Its greatest value lies in helping organisations ask better questions, make better decisions and design programmes that create measurable impact.
Perhaps the questions boardrooms should be asking are no longer: How do we produce a better sustainability report? Instead, perhaps they should be asking: What is truly material to our business? Who else should be around the table to help us solve it? Have we designed a sustainability programme where every stakeholder has a genuine reason to succeed?
Those questions shift sustainability from a reporting obligation to a business strategy. They encourage organisations to think beyond annual disclosures and towards building resilient supply chains, thriving communities and healthier ecosystems that support long term business success.
The companies that will lead tomorrow will not be remembered for the reports they published. They will be remembered for the resilience they built, the partnerships they forged and the ecosystems they helped restore. More importantly, they will be remembered for recognising that business success, community prosperity and environmental stewardship are not competing priorities. They are mutually reinforcing.
Compliance may get you into the race. Collective action helps you scale. But the future of corporate sustainability belongs to organisations that make sustainability a core business strategy and ensure everyone has skin in the game.
Maryann Wanjiku Nderu is an ESG and Sustainability Consultant, Impact Storyteller and Member of the Board of Management of the Upper Tana Nairobi Water Fund Trust. Drawing on 16 years of corporate sustainability experience, she is passionate about helping organisations move sustainability beyond compliance by designing strategies that strengthen business resilience while creating lasting value for communities and the environment. You can engage via email at: Maryann. Wanjiku @ gmail. com.