GS1247 VPA 206 Sierra Leone Safe Water

Audit Analysis

This Gold Standard safe-water project in Sierra Leone has a verified additionality assessment and no reversal events, but is burdened by an extensive list of material findings, open corrective actions, borehole operational failures, and a lack of exit strategy. The project is significantly under-delivering relative to its ex-ante estimates, with Gold Standard grievance-review caps further constraining credit issuance. Multiple contradictions across documents (leakage treatment, fNRB values, additionality test type) reduce confidence in the data record.

Project Description

Red Flags

• ⚠Extensive list of material findings including 4,193 borehole non-functional days, two boreholes retired, and a declining usage rate (93.98% to 81.73%) across monitoring periods
• ⚠No exit strategy documented, posing long-term risk to beneficiaries and project permanence
• ⚠Leakage deduction reduced from 5% in the PDD to 0% in the verification report with only a 'deemed negligible' justification, which is weak for a distributed water-supply project
• ⚠Achieved emission reductions (25,442 tCO2e at programme level) are a small fraction of the ex-ante estimate (100,000 tCO2e/year), indicating the baseline or ex-ante assumptions were significantly overstated

Credit Vintages