GS4424 VPA2 African Cookstoves and Water Prorgamme

Audit Analysis

A Gold Standard cookstove project in Rwanda with VVB-verified additionality and matching claimed/verified ERR figures, but undermined by significant contradictions in usage rates and leakage justification across monitoring reports, seven material findings in the verification report, and low extraction confidence in the underlying documents. The project-specific baseline and absence of buffer pool information further weaken the integrity profile.

Project Description

Red Flags

• ⚠Usage rate verified as 52.74% in the 2023 verification report versus 0.83 (83%) in the 2022 monitoring report — a gap of over 30 percentage points that raises serious data-reliability concerns
• ⚠PDD assumed a 99% usage rate while the monitoring report applied only 70%, indicating the ex-ante estimate may be substantially overstated
• ⚠Seven material findings in the verification report, including inconsistent ICS unit counts across MR sections and an outdated TDR used for random sampling
• ⚠Leakage justification contradicted between the 2020 monitoring report (quantified) and the 2023 monitoring report (deemed negligible), with a 0% deduction applied
• ⚠Low extraction confidence across the document set, meaning key figures may not have been reliably captured

Credit Vintages