Efficient and Clean Cooking for Mozambican Low-Income Households

Audit Analysis

A Gold Standard cookstove project in Mozambique with verified additionality, FPIC, and a quantified 5% leakage deduction, but undermined by a massive gap between the PDD ex-ante estimate (~5.08 million tCO₂e lifetime) and the verified monitoring-period figure (~23,800 tCO₂e), 13 corrective actions raised by the VVB, and reversal risk that is explicitly not addressed. The project is delivering roughly 1% of its pro-rata ex-ante expectation for the elapsed monitoring period, raising serious questions about the realism of the original estimate and the project's actual impact.

Project Description

Red Flags

• ⚠Verified ERR of 23,834 tCO₂e for the 2020–2023 monitoring period is only ~1.1% of the pro-rata expectation derived from the PDD lifetime estimate of 5,075,644 tCO₂e over a 7-year crediting period, indicating either a severely over-optimistic PDD or a major implementation shortfall.
• ⚠Reversal events are explicitly 'not addressed' in the verification report, and no buffer pool percentage is stated — a significant gap for a cookstove project where stoves can break, be lost, or households can revert to traditional cooking.
• ⚠The VVB raised 13 Corrective Action Requests (CARs), 4 Clarifications (CLs), and 1 Further Action Request (FAR), indicating substantial compliance and reporting deficiencies.
• ⚠Low extraction confidence across the document set means key data points may be incomplete or misread, reducing reliability of the overall assessment.

Credit Vintages