GS1247 VPA 157 Improved Kitchen Regimes: Kayonza District Borehole Project, Rwanda

Audit Analysis

A Gold Standard improved-kitchen (borehole) project in Rwanda with VVB-confirmed additionality and no reported reversal events, but undermined by a 10% gap between assumed and verified usage rates, contradictory FNRB values across documents, a zero leakage deduction with inconsistent justifications, and the absence of a verified ERR figure to benchmark against the 159,041 tCO₂e claimed. The project also underwent a design change to redistribute boreholes into new VPAs to address over-crediting caps, signalling that initial crediting was too generous.

Project Description

Red Flags

• ⚠Usage rate assumed at 100% in the project design but verified at only 90% in monitoring, implying a 10% over-crediting margin that is not explicitly deducted
• ⚠FNRB value contradicts across documents: 0.98 (national default, 2020 monitoring) vs 0.85 (local field, 2023 PDD) — a 15% swing in the net factor that materially affects credit volume
• ⚠No verified ERR figure is available in the extracted record, making it impossible to confirm whether the 159,041 tCO₂e claimed is supported by monitoring data
• ⚠Design change to redistribute boreholes into new VPAs (GS5394, GS6837, GS6838) specifically to address over-crediting caps, indicating the original allocation exceeded what the methodology permitted
• ⚠Leakage justification is inconsistent: 'deemed negligible' in the 2020 monitoring report versus 'quantified' in the 2019 monitoring report, with a 0% deduction applied in both cases

Credit Vintages Exhausted