GS10789 VPA81: Efficient and Clean Cooking for households in Senegal

Audit Analysis

This Gold Standard cookstove project in Senegal has VVB-confirmed additionality and no reported reversals, but is undermined by an extensive list of material findings and corrective actions, a missing buffer pool, a leakage deduction reduced from 5% to 0% without robust justification, and multiple contradictions across documents on key parameters such as fNRB, leakage, and crediting period. The project delivered roughly 114% of its pro-rata ex-ante expectation for the elapsed monitoring period, which is reasonable, but the data quality issues and parameter inconsistencies raise meaningful over-crediting and permanence concerns.

Project Description

Red Flags

• ⚠No buffer pool percentage is stated in any available document, leaving no quantified mechanism to cover potential reversals in a cookstove project where household reversion is a realistic risk
• ⚠Leakage deduction was reduced from 5% in the PDD (2023) to 0% in the verification report (2024) with only a 'deemed negligible' justification, while the monitoring report (2024) described leakage as 'quantified' — an unexplained and contradictory shift
• ⚠Over 30 material findings and over 40 corrective actions were identified across verification and validation reports, including typographical errors, missing end-user names, formula errors, inconsistent parameter values, and unresolved questions on stove lifetime, fNRB sourcing, and double-counting prevention
• ⚠fNRB value changed from 0.9664 (local field method, earlier verification) to 0.8487 (national default, later verification), a direction that increases claimed reductions and was flagged in corrective actions for comparison with other registered projects
• ⚠Crediting period end date is missing (null) in the verification report, and the validation report gives a different start date (2024-10-02) than the verification report (2021-08-20), creating uncertainty about the actual crediting window

Credit Vintages