GS5047 VPA26 African Improved Cookstoves and Clean Water Programme: Nyagatare Safe Water Project VI

Audit Analysis

This Gold Standard water project in Rwanda has VVB-confirmed additionality and a named verification body, but is undermined by numerous material findings (GPS verification failures, potential double counting, 12 boreholes removed, downtime rising to 9%), multiple corrective actions requiring caps and exclusions, a project-specific baseline with no buffer pool, and contradictory leakage justifications across documents. The VVB reduced claimed emissions reductions by roughly 25%, indicating the initial methodology was overly generous.

Project Description

Red Flags

• ⚠Borehole GPS locations could not be verified; some showed bare land or trees instead of infrastructure (verification report, Dec 2023)
• ⚠Potential double counting of users due to overlapping 1 km radii of nearby boreholes (verification report)
• ⚠12 boreholes removed from the project database during the monitoring period; average downtime rose from 1.2% to 9.0% (monitoring report)
• ⚠Leakage justification contradicts itself: one monitoring report states 'deemed negligible' while an earlier one states 'quantified' (contradiction between 2023-07-14 and 2023-12-20 reports)
• ⚠Multiple corrective actions required including capping water withdrawal, capping usage rate at 90%, and excluding households beyond 1 km — indicating the initial methodology over-credited

Credit Vintages