Shimba Hills Improved Cook Stoves

Audit Analysis

The Shimba Hills Improved Cook Stoves project (Gold Standard, Kenya) has a structurally sound design with an investment additionality test, safeguards, and a named VVB, but is undermined by severe contradictions in emission-reduction figures across documents (a 9× discrepancy in the ex-ante lifetime estimate), a project-specific baseline with no recorded reassessment, no stated buffer pool, and a long history of material findings and corrective actions spanning multiple verification cycles. The project delivered roughly 61% of the pro-rata expectation for the elapsed monitoring period (using the PDD ex-ante figure), which is conservative, but the data-reliability issues cast doubt on the precision of all reported figures.

Project Description

Red Flags

• ⚠Ex-ante lifetime ERR differs by a factor of ~9 between the PDD (680,437 tCO₂e) and the monitoring report (73,562 tCO₂e), both dated November 2017 — a fundamental data-reliability issue
• ⚠Verified ERR differs between the 2017 verification report (39,496) and the 2018 issuance record (69,238), a 76% gap that is not explained in the extracted record
• ⚠fNRB value rose from 0.73 (2017 VR) to 0.92 (2018 VR) and the method shifted from local field measurement to national default, increasing claimed reductions without a clear documented justification
• ⚠No buffer pool percentage, no permanence claim duration, and no baseline reassessment date are stated in any available document
• ⚠Repeated material findings across at least four verification cycles (2014, 2017, 2018) indicate persistent documentation and calculation-quality problems, including stove-ID mismatches, missing calibration records, and ER spreadsheet errors

Credit Vintages