Carbon accounting software built in Europe or North America rests on an assumption so basic that it is almost never written down: that a company's electricity comes from the grid, continuously, and is metered by a utility.
In that world the Scope 2 calculation is one multiplication — consumption times a published grid factor — and on-site generation is an edge case. Backup power that runs a handful of hours a year during an outage, rounds to nothing, and does not merit its own place in the data model.
In Nigeria the edge case is the main case.
What the assumption costs
Consider two plants consuming identical total electricity. The first draws all of it from the grid. The second draws half and generates the rest on diesel.
The first reports a clean Scope 2 figure and almost nothing in Scope 1. The second reports half that Scope 2, plus a substantial Scope 1 figure at a completely different emission factor — and because diesel generation is considerably more carbon-intensive per unit of electricity than most grid supply, a higher total.
A platform that never asks how the electricity was produced will take both companies' kilowatt-hours, apply a grid factor, and report them identically. The arithmetic will be flawless. The answer will be wrong for the second company, in a direction nobody checks, by a margin that is frequently material.
The error is invisible, which is the problem
A figure that is obviously wrong gets caught. A figure that is quietly wrong — clean arithmetic, plausible magnitude, professionally presented — survives review, gets signed off, and appears in a filed disclosure. This is the mechanism by which good software produces a bad number.
Three other places the assumption shows
The factor set. A platform shipping US or EU grid factors as defaults will apply one to a Nigerian site unless somebody intervenes. 'You can upload custom factors' moves the maintenance burden — and the risk of missing a revision — onto the customer.
The report structures. Outputs shaped for CSRD or the US SEC rules are a different document from an FRC or SEC Nigeria disclosure. The remapping is real work and it recurs annually.
The materiality workflow. CSRD requires double materiality; the ISSB standards Nigeria adopted require financial materiality. A platform whose assessment flow assumes the European test will lead a Nigerian filer's materiality assessment in the wrong direction from the first question.
What to ask a vendor
Not 'do you support Nigeria'. Every vendor says yes.
Ask instead: is on-site diesel generation a first-class input in your data model, or a custom field? Which Nigerian factors ship with the product, from what source, and what happens to prior-year calculations when one is revised?
Which report structures do you output natively? What currency is the invoice in?
Those four answers tell you more than a demo. And if you are evaluating us, ask them of us too — the point is the questions, not the conclusion.