TIST Program in Kenya, VCS 006

Audit Analysis

The TIST Kenya program is a large-scale smallholder agroforestry project with verified additionality, a 10% buffer pool, and CCB certification, but it carries a substantial burden of material findings including quantifier data errors requiring removal of 662 groves, 67 contract-violating harvest events, and open findings in a 2024 project review. The project delivered only about 46% of its pro-rata ex-ante expectation for the 2014–2021 monitoring period, which is conservative but raises questions about the accuracy of the original lifetime estimate. Overall, the project is functional and registered but its operational and data-integrity issues warrant caution.

Project Description

Red Flags

• ⚠Quantifier Shadrack Thuranira submitted erroneous data, requiring removal of 662 groves and 77,572 trees from project scope (verification report, 2021)
• ⚠67 Project Areas had harvest activity in violation of contract during the monitoring period (verification report, 2021)
• ⚠Open findings remain in the Project Review Report dated July 24, 2024, indicating unresolved issues at the time of the latest available documentation
• ⚠TIST Quantifiers were not visiting each Project Area once per year as described in the Project Design Document, though this was an operational goal rather than a methodology requirement
• ⚠Insufficient farmer interviews (6 out of 27,000) to represent the community, with a well-being sample of 124 questioned for statistical validity

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