Southern Africa Clean Cookstove Initiative (SACCI) PoA: VPA01 in Zimbabwe

Audit Analysis

The SACCI Zimbabwe cookstove project has a solid additionality assessment confirmed by the VVB and a conservative usage-rate assumption, but suffers from a notable absence of a buffer pool and unaddressed reversal risk for a project type where cookstove replacement is a realistic threat. Multiple contradictions across the PDD, monitoring report, and verification report—particularly on leakage deduction, safeguards documentation, and the ex-ante ERR figure—undermine confidence in the internal consistency of the project's claims.

Project Description

Red Flags

• ⚠No buffer pool is stated in any available document, and reversal events are explicitly 'not addressed'—a significant gap for a cookstove project where units can be replaced with traditional stoves within the 5-year crediting period.
• ⚠Eight contradictions exist across project documents, including a 5× discrepancy in the leakage deduction (0.95% in the PDD vs 5% in the monitoring report) and conflicting statements on whether safeguards were documented (verification report says yes, monitoring report says no).
• ⚠The total ex-ante lifetime ERR is inconsistent: the PDD (2022) states ~1.03 million tCO₂e while an undated, unidentified document states ~1.45 million tCO₂e, and the source of the latter cannot be verified.
• ⚠The verification report (Aug 2025) records the leakage justification as 'not addressed' while the monitoring report (Jul 2025) records it as 'quantified'—a direct conflict on a material MRV element.

Credit Vintages