GS5658 VPA 37: “Access to energy for local development and resilience building in Uganda”

Audit Analysis

A Gold Standard cooking-stove programme in Uganda with VVB-confirmed additionality and a reasonable national-default fNRB, but undermined by 15 material findings (including calculation errors and a crediting-period mismatch), contradictory leakage justifications across documents, and the absence of any documented buffer pool or permanence mechanism. The ERR figures across monitoring reports are inconsistent, making it difficult to confirm whether the project is over- or under-delivering relative to its ex-ante estimate.

Project Description

Red Flags

• ⚠Three corrective-action requests (CARs) in the verification report include vintage-break calculation errors and a crediting-period mismatch between the monitoring report and the VPA-DD/SC application
• ⚠Leakage justification is contradictory: the PDD (2021) states 'deemed negligible' while the monitoring report (2023) states 'quantified', yet the deduction is 0% in both cases
• ⚠Two monitoring reports report materially different claimed ERR values (3,690 tCO2e in 2023 vs 24,656 tCO2e in 2020), and the verified figure of 24,656 tCO2e cannot be clearly reconciled with the ex-ante lifetime estimate of 37,697 tCO2e over five years
• ⚠No buffer pool, permanence mechanism, or reversal-risk mitigation is documented for this avoidance-type project
• ⚠Grievance mechanism status is contradictory: the PDD (2020) records it as absent while the verification report (2024) confirms its presence

Credit Vintages