Fairtrade Project: Cookstoves for coffee farmers, Ethiopia

Audit Analysis

This cookstove project has some positive signs, including VVB-confirmed additionality, a verified usage rate of 86.31%, and no material findings in the verification report. However, the record has important reliability gaps and contradictions around leakage treatment and credited emissions, and the project is not in the public registry, which weakens confidence in the claim.

Project Description

Deforestation and climate change are threatening the coffee sector in Ethiopia. Coffee is extremely sensitive to rising temperatures. An increase of just one degree already results in a loss of quality of the coffee beans, two degrees means a loss of productivity and at three degrees the coffee plant has difficulty surviving. If current trends continue, coffee could become a scarce commodity in the coming decades. Small-scale farmers are particularly hit hard. Rapid deforestation in Ethiopia is leading to increasing drought. Coffee farmers (often women) that depend on the income that their land generates and are financially unable to bear the consequences of the changing climate. In this project, nearly 6,000 households are benefitting from a more efficient cookstove, the Tikikil, for general use and a Mirt, for a flat round bread made of teff flour (Injera) to bake. The Tikikil replaces the much-used traditional way of cooking on an open fire. The participating households own the cookstoves and pay for these stoves partly in cash and partly with the CO2 credits that the use yields. Cooking with the Tikikil and Mirt reduces the use of wood and CO2 emissions by 40%.  There is less smoke in the house and more time savings for women who need to collect less wood and can cook faster. In addition, coffee farmers are made more resistant to the consequences of climate change through the implementation of a Climate Academy. The academy promotes, among other things, Sustainable Agricultural Land Mechanisms (SALMS), such as promoting shade trees to protect the coffee plants from too much sun. Project impacts and benefits: Health Clean cooking prevents the inhalation of harmful smoke Less physical strain because less wood has to be collected for cooking Climate and environment Decrease in deforestation and improved biodiversity Decrease in CO2 emissions Social Women experience a lot of convenience and can spend more time on family an

Red Flags

• ⚠ The project is not in the public registry, limiting external traceability.
• ⚠ There are contradictions between the monitoring and verification reports on leakage treatment and credited emissions.
• ⚠ Baseline method and last reassessment are not stated in the extracted record.

Credit Vintages

Cosa migliorerebbe questo punteggio

• Publish a complete public registry record with the baseline method, reassessment history, leakage treatment, and verified issuance totals.
• Provide explicit documentation for FPIC, safeguard implementation, buffer pool treatment, and a reconciled explanation of the leakage and ERR discrepancies across reports.

Questi suggerimenti indicano quali prove pubbliche aggiuntive potrebbero migliorare il livello di confidenza di questa valutazione. Non garantiscono un punteggio futuro più alto.