Fuel Efficient Cooking in South Africa

Audit Analysis

This VCS cookstove project in South Africa has a verified additionality assessment and no reported reversal events, but is undermined by 26 material findings, 26 corrective actions, and nine cross-document contradictions covering leakage, fNRB method, FPIC, and benefit-sharing. The project-specific baseline, absence of a stated buffer pool, and a 10% gap between assumed and verified usage rates introduce meaningful over-crediting risk. Documentation is voluminous (48 sources) but riddled with missing spreadsheets, broken links, and inconsistent values that erode confidence in the reported figures.

Project Description

Red Flags

• ⚠26 material findings and 26 corrective actions identified by the VVB, including calculation errors in stove-days, #REF! errors in the ERR spreadsheet, and households with non-woody biomass baselines initially included in ER claims
• ⚠Leakage deduction contradicts between documents: the verification report states 0% while the more recent monitoring report states 5%, with the justification shifting from 'not addressed' to 'quantified' across verification cycles
• ⚠fNRB method is contradictory: one verification report (May 2024) records it as 'not applicable' while an earlier one (Mar 2024) records 'local field', yet the fNRB value of 0.88 is used in calculations
• ⚠No buffer pool percentage is stated in any available document, leaving permanence risk unquantified
• ⚠FPIC status is contradictory: the verification report (Feb 2026) confirms it was conducted, but the monitoring report (Jan 2026) records it as not conducted

Credit Vintages