A Nigerian mobile network is, from an emissions perspective, a diesel generation business with a telecommunications application. The radio equipment consumes a modest and well-understood amount of power; the emissions come from how that power is produced, and across much of the estate it is produced on site by a generator because grid supply is unavailable or unreliable.
Head office, retail stores and the corporate fleet are rounding errors against it. If you get the site fuel right, you have your footprint. If you do not, nothing else you measure matters.
That makes this a logistics problem rather than a measurement problem. The emission factor is not in dispute. What is in dispute is how many litres actually went into how many generators at how many sites in a given month, and who has that record.
In our experience the data exists — it is just held by people who were never asked for it in this form.
It is worth separating the two from the start, because they behave differently and are read differently.
The network footprint scales with coverage and traffic. It falls when you improve site energy efficiency, hybridise with solar, or connect a site to grid supply — and it rises when you expand. Reported on its own, it tells a coverage story as much as an efficiency one.
The corporate footprint — offices, stores, fleet, travel — is small, controllable, and the part your staff can see. It is not where the emissions are, but it is where a great deal of internal engagement happens.
Report both, and report network emissions per subscriber or per terabyte alongside the absolute figure. Otherwise network expansion looks like environmental deterioration, which is neither fair nor useful.
As reduced diesel consumption, which is exactly right — solar generation itself produces no operational emissions to report. The improvement shows up as a fall in Scope 1 and in emissions per site. It is one of the few interventions in this sector that is both commercially obvious and visible in the disclosure.
Grid consumption is Scope 2 and generator fuel at the same site is Scope 1. Many sites are both, hour by hour, so you need consumption from the DisCo bill and fuel from delivery records for the same period. This is the same grid-versus-generation split that affects every Nigerian sector.
If you sell them, yes — purchased goods and services upstream, and use of sold products downstream. For most operators handset-related emissions are material enough to warrant a screening assessment even if they are estimated in the first cycle.
A summary of a regulation is not the regulation. These are the primary documents this page is based on.
Four questions, and you get the year you first file, the framework, and what to collect first.
Plain-language explainers of the FRC and SEC rules, ISSB S1 & S2, and what each asks you to disclose.
What a consultant-led reporting cycle costs against an annual licence, in Naira.
