GS5047 VPA39 African Improved Cookstoves and Clean Water Programme: Nyungwe Rainforest Cookstove Project VII

Audit Analysis

A Gold Standard cookstove project in Rwanda with a combined additionality test and no reported reversal events, but the verification report identified nine material findings including broken stoves, data inconsistencies in stove counts, and a crediting-period mismatch. The project relies on a project-specific baseline and a 0% leakage deduction justified only as 'deemed negligible,' with no buffer pool or lifetime ex-ante ERR figure available to benchmark delivery. Corrective actions are in progress but the volume of findings and the CDM-form origin of the PDD raise moderate concerns about data reliability.

Project Description

Red Flags

• ⚠Nine material findings in the verification report, including 9 stoves reported non-operational and a 1.65% broken-stove rate in the usage survey, undermining the 100% working-time claim
• ⚠No lifetime ex-ante ERR figure available; the claimed and verified ERR are identical (81,129), making it impossible to assess over- or under-delivery against a pro-rata expectation
• ⚠Leakage treatment contradicts itself across two monitoring reports (one says 'quantified,' the other 'deemed negligible'), and the 0% deduction rests on a thin justification
• ⚠The PDD is a CDM Programme of Activities design form (F-CDM-PoA-DD v03.0), suggesting the documentation was adapted from a CDM template rather than prepared natively for Gold Standard

Credit Vintages