GS10789 VPA3: Efficient and Clean Cooking for households in Kenya

Audit Analysis

A Gold Standard household cookstove project in Kenya with confirmed additionality and documented safeguards, but undermined by the absence of any buffer pool or permanence tracking, a 67% downward revision of the non-renewable biomass fraction (fNRB) between reporting cycles, and an unusually high volume of material findings and corrective actions that point to significant data-quality and internal-consistency problems across the project's documentation.

Project Description

Red Flags

• ⚠No buffer pool or reversal-event tracking is reported for an energy-efficiency project where stove failure or household reversion creates genuine permanence risk; the 11.7% of stoves not in active use (100% − 88.33% usage rate) is unmitigated.
• ⚠The fNRB value was revised downward from 0.8933 (local field measurement, 2024 verification report) to 0.29 (national default, 2026 verification report) to meet CCP labelling requirements — a 67% reduction that calls into question whether earlier credits were over-claimed.
• ⚠Over 50 material findings and 40+ corrective actions were logged across the verification and validation cycles, including inconsistencies in emission-reduction values, stove sales figures, ex-ante parameters, and SDG impact estimates between the PDD, monitoring reports, and ER calculation sheets.
• ⚠Leakage treatment changed from 'deemed negligible' with a 0% deduction (2024 verification report) to a 5% default deduction (2026 verification report), indicating the earlier assessment was insufficient.
• ⚠CORSIA eligibility is not stated in any available document, leaving the dual-channel risk unassessed.

Credit Vintages