GS5047 VPA27 African Improved Cookstoves and Clean Water Programme: Nyagatare Safe Water Project VII

Audit Analysis

This Gold Standard water and cookstove project in Rwanda has VVB-verified additionality and a conservative usage rate, but is undermined by serious material findings (unverified borehole GPS locations, potential double-counting of users, and survey methodology gaps), a questionable 0% leakage deduction for a multi-village water scheme, and multiple cross-document contradictions. The low extraction confidence and legacy document format further weaken the evidentiary base.

Project Description

Red Flags

• ⚠Borehole GPS locations could not be verified by the VVB; some showed bare land or trees instead of infrastructure, undermining the spatial basis of the ER calculation
• ⚠Potential double counting of users due to overlapping 1 km radii of nearby boreholes, directly inflating the claimed ER
• ⚠0% leakage deduction applied to a water project serving multiple villages, with the justification shifting between 'quantified' (monitoring report) and 'deemed negligible' (PDD) across documents
• ⚠ERR contradiction: the verification report records 47,308 tCO₂e while the monitoring report records 62,570 tCO₂e for the same period, a 32% discrepancy
• ⚠Four corrective actions were required by the VVB, including recollecting all GPS coordinates and capping the usage rate, indicating the as-submitted data was not fully reliable

Credit Vintages