THE VERDICT | Seplat Energy Is Redefining What an Indigenous Energy Company Owes Its Communities

With 110,000 eye treatments, 623 teachers empowered, and a 13-year track record of verifiable impact, Seplat Energy is showing that responsible energy production and genuine community investment are not mutually exclusive.

By CSR Reporters Editorial Desk 

There is a version of CSR that exists to satisfy auditors, impress award committees, and populate annual report pages. It involves cheque presentations, ribbon cuttings, and photographs with community elders. It is common. It is also largely useless.

And then there is what Seplat Energy has been building — quietly, consistently, and with measurable results — since 2012.

Nigeria’s leading indigenous energy company has, over thirteen years, constructed a community investment portfolio that is not defined by donation amounts or press releases. It is defined by outcomes: restored sight, empowered teachers, functional laboratories, and a social performance framework aligned with the Petroleum Industry Act. In an industry where the gap between CSR promise and community reality is often vast — and sometimes criminal — Seplat Energy is narrowing that gap, programme by programme, year by year.

This commendation is not uncritical. CSR Reporters does not issue endorsements. But where evidence of genuine, structured, sustained community impact exists, it must be named — because accountability runs both ways.

“At Seplat Energy, we believe that true corporate success is measured not only by financial performance, but by the positive and enduring impact we create in the lives of the people and communities we serve.” — Ibi-Ada Itotoi, Managing Director, Seplat East Onshore Limited

Eye Can See: 13 Years of Restored Vision

In 2012, Seplat Energy launched what would become one of Nigeria’s most sustained corporate healthcare initiatives: the Eye Can See programme, delivered through its Joint Venture with the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL).

The 2025 edition of the programme — now in its thirteenth year — launched in Owerri, Imo State, before culminating in a ceremony at the Oba of Benin’s Palace in Benin City, Edo State. The numbers behind it are not projections or targets. They are verified outcomes.

What distinguishes Eye Can See from a standard medical outreach is its deliberate integration of health education alongside treatment. The programme does not simply screen and treat — it educates beneficiaries on the connections between vision health and conditions such as hypertension, glaucoma, and diabetes. The Edo State Commissioner for Health, Dr. Cyril Adams Oshiomhole, noted during the 2025 edition that more than half of the conditions that lead to blindness are treatable, and that early intervention programmes like Eye Can See are demonstrating this to communities that have never had consistent access to eye care.

According to Seplat’s Director of External Affairs and Social Performance, Chioma Afe, the goal is to provide communities with tools and knowledge that sustain impact long after each programme cycle ends. That is the language of systemic investment, not philanthropy.

For context: approximately 1.13 million Nigerians aged 40 and above currently live with visual impairment — around 4.2% of that age group. Over 13 years, Seplat’s programme has treated over 110,000 of them, at no cost. The societal value of restored sight — the ability to work, support a family, and participate fully in economic and social life — cannot be easily quantified. But it is real, and it is verifiable.

Building Classrooms and Classrooms of Thought: The Education Portfolio

Healthcare is only one dimension of Seplat’s community investment strategy. The company’s education portfolio is equally structured and equally outcomes-driven.

The Seplat Teachers Empowerment Programme (STEP), delivered in partnership with the NNPCL Joint Venture, is not a one-time training workshop. It is a recurring, annually delivered programme that equips teachers and Chief Inspectors of Education with digital teaching skills, leadership training, and income diversification capabilities. In 2025, 650 teachers and inspectors across Edo and Delta States were onboarded. By 2026, 623 had graduated from the programme — at a ceremony held at the Victor Uwaifo Creative Hub in Benin City.

The logic behind investing in teachers rather than just infrastructure is sound: a well-equipped, well-trained teacher multiplies impact across every student they teach, across every year of their career. It is a lever, not a gesture.

Alongside STEP, the Seplat Innovators Programme has commissioned STEAM laboratories — collaborative learning environments integrating Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics — at Ogbe and Uselu Secondary Schools in Oredo and Ikpoba Okha Local Government Areas of Edo State. These are not equipment donations. They are fully commissioned facilities, handed over to schools and designed for sustained educational use.

The Seplat National Undergraduate Scholarship, running since 2014, has provided university scholarships to students from host communities, with a significant percentage from those communities. The PEARLs Quiz programme awards scholarships and prize money to secondary school students and their schools. These are not one-off grants — they are structured pipelines connecting Seplat’s operational footprint to educational opportunity.

A well-equipped teacher multiplies impact across every student they teach, across every year of their career. That is the logic behind STEP — and it is the logic of systemic investment, not philanthropy.

The Accountability Framework: Why This Is Different

Awards and programmes do not, by themselves, constitute evidence of responsible CSR. CSR Reporters has seen enough polished reports and well-photographed handovers to know that the gap between a company’s self-assessment and its community’s experience can be wide.

What earns Seplat Energy this commendation is not its programmes in isolation — it is the accountability framework that sits behind them.

In 2024, Seplat published its inaugural Social Performance Report, titled Transforming Lives Through Energy. This report is not a sustainability narrative. It is a structured disclosure document aligned with the community development requirements of Nigeria’s Petroleum Industry Act. It tracks social impact against corporate strategy, outlines compliance milestones, and documents changes across CSI programmes, employee engagement, and vendor relationships. It is the kind of reporting CSR Reporters believes all Nigerian companies operating in host communities should be required to produce.

In its 2025 full-year results, Seplat reported that beyond Eye Can See and STEP, the company’s Tree4Life reforestation programme planted 200,208 trees — more than double its annual target. It also provided solar energy access to 138 off-grid households in host communities. These are not corporate messaging points. They are auditable outcomes.

The company has received external recognition for this approach. At the 2024 SERAS Africa awards, Seplat Energy emerged best in Social Impact and Human Capacity Development. It has received CSR Reporters’ own SISA Education Empowerment Award. These are not reasons to commend it — the outcomes are. But the consistency of external recognition does suggest that Seplat’s impact is visible beyond its own reporting.

The Broader Significance: An Indigenous Standard-Bearer

Seplat Energy’s commendation carries a significance that extends beyond the company itself. As international oil majors have exited Nigeria — Shell, Eni, ExxonMobil, TotalEnergies — they have transferred operational responsibility to indigenous companies. The question hanging over the Niger Delta is whether those indigenous companies will replicate the accountability failures of their predecessors, or whether they will chart a different course.

Seplat Energy is not operating in the same contested onshore territory that Shell left. But it is an indigenous energy company with significant host community obligations — and it is meeting them with a degree of structure, consistency, and transparency that many of its peers have not demonstrated.

That matters. Because the argument that responsible community investment is economically unviable — that ESG compliance is a luxury for multinationals, not a realistic expectation for African companies — is undermined every year that Seplat runs Eye Can See, graduates another cohort of STEP teachers, and commissions another STEAM laboratory.

CSR Reporters commends Seplat Energy not as a perfect actor, but as a company that has made a sustained, structured, and verifiable commitment to the communities it operates in. In the current Nigerian energy landscape, that is both notable and necessary.

CSR Reporters’ Final Verdict

The Nigerian energy sector has a long and painful history of communities bearing the costs of corporate extraction without sharing meaningfully in its benefits. Shell’s exit from the Niger Delta without environmental remediation is the most recent and most egregious expression of that history.

Seplat Energy does not erase that history. But it offers something important: proof of concept. Proof that an indigenous energy company can build a community investment portfolio that is structured rather than spontaneous, outcomes-focused rather than image-focused, and accountable to both its stakeholders and its host communities.

Our commendation comes with a standing expectation: that this standard is maintained, deepened, and expanded as Seplat grows. The company’s 2026–2030 strategic plan targets production of 200,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day — a significant scale-up. CSR Reporters will be watching to see whether the community investment portfolio scales with it.

Because responsible leadership, as we have always said, must be earned, tested, and accountable. Seplat Energy has earned this week’s verdict. The test continues.

Our commendation comes with a standing expectation: that this standard is maintained and deepened as Seplat grows. The company’s scale-up to 200,000 boepd means its community obligations grow too. CSR Reporters will be watching.