D.Light's Improved Cooking Project In Kenya

Audit Analysis

D.Light's cookstove project in Kenya is a VCS-registered avoidance project with VVB-confirmed additionality, a quantified 5% leakage deduction, and no material findings. However, the project relies on a project-specific baseline, the crediting period was shortened from the PDD's 21-year proposal to 7 years, and seven corrective action requests were raised during verification, indicating some monitoring compliance friction. The project delivered roughly 40% of the pro-rata expectation from the PDD's ex-ante estimate for the elapsed monitoring period, a gap partly explained by more conservative FNRB and leakage assumptions applied during monitoring.

Project Description

Red Flags

• ⚠Crediting period in the 2025 verification report (7 years, 2022–2029) is less than one-third of the 21-year period stated in the PDD (2022–2043), indicating a major restructuring of the project design that is not clearly explained in the extracted record.
• ⚠Seven corrective action requests were raised and closed during the November 2025 verification, covering non-compliance with the monitoring plan, undocumented modifications, and calculation errors — a volume that signals recurring monitoring-quality issues.
• ⚠The FNRB value dropped from 0.9351 (local field, PDD) to 0.7875 (national default, monitoring/verification), a 16% reduction that materially lowers credit output and suggests the original PDD baseline may have been optimistic.
• ⚠The project delivered approximately 40% of the pro-rata expectation derived from the PDD's lifetime estimate for the 15.5-month monitoring period, even after adjusting for the lower FNRB and the 5% leakage deduction.

Credit Vintages