GS5047 VPA7 African Improved Cookstoves and Clean Water Programme: Virunga Mountain Gorilla Cookstove Project Musanze

Audit Analysis

The Virunga Mountain Gorilla Cookstove Project (GS5047 VPA7) is a Gold Standard improved cookstove project in Rwanda with VVB-verified additionality and a conservative FNRB of 0.98, but is undermined by the absence of FPIC, unaddressed reversal risk, a project-specific baseline, and an extensive list of material findings related to data quality and calculation errors. The project appears to be under-delivering relative to ex-ante estimates, which is conservative for claim safety, but the volume of monitoring issues and inter-document contradictions reduce confidence in the overall data integrity.

Project Description

Red Flags

• ⚠FPIC was not conducted despite the project distributing cookstoves to communities across four districts in Rwanda
• ⚠Reversal events are explicitly 'not addressed' in the verification report, and no buffer pool percentage is stated
• ⚠The verification report lists over 20 material findings including duplicate stove IDs, damaged stoves not flagged as non-users, incorrect non-CO2 emission factors, and miscalculated Project Technology Days
• ⚠Actual emission reductions are reported as 'considerably below estimated values' due to lower usage rate and KPT results, indicating the ex-ante assumptions were overly optimistic
• ⚠A contradiction exists between the verification report (44,128 tCO2e) and the monitoring report (32,609 tCO2e) for total ERR claimed

Credit Vintages