Safe Water Programme – Nigeria – VPA 03

Audit Analysis

The Safe Water Programme in Nigeria has a confirmed investment-test additionality and a named VVB, but is undermined by a severe FNRB discrepancy between verification cycles (82.3 national default vs. 0.96 local field), a 0% leakage deduction that the verification report itself labels 'not addressed,' the absence of any buffer pool, and 24 outstanding corrective actions. The project's claim safety is materially weakened by the unresolved FNRB contradiction and the project-specific baseline, making over-crediting risk a central concern.

Project Description

Red Flags

• ⚠FNRB value changed from 0.96 (local field, 2023 verification) to 82.3 (national default, 2024 verification) — an ~86-fold difference that, if not a unit error, implies a fundamental shift in the emission factor underpinning all claimed reductions.
• ⚠Leakage deduction is 0% and the 2024 verification report (the higher-priority document) records the justification as 'not addressed,' while the monitoring report claims it was 'deemed negligible' — the VVB did not validate the negligible-leakage claim.
• ⚠24 corrective actions remain open, including sampling-design non-compliance with CDM Appendix 3, unverified treatment-capacity values, and a typographical error that referenced Kenya instead of Nigeria for baseline parameters.
• ⚠Total ERR figures differ by nearly a factor of two between the 2023 and 2024 verification reports (647,669 vs. 1,232,137), and no lifetime ex-ante estimate is available to benchmark the pro-rata expectation.

Credit Vintages