Uncertainty is an unavoidable fact of life, and we confront this on a daily basis when making decisions with incomplete available information. Inaccuracy is often avoidable and an unforgivable misrepresentation of reality.

Carbon registered projects have an obligation to report the daily usage of the technology deployed when requesting for carbon credit issuance. Cycle credit issuance can be improved with the use of technology, which has to be aligned with the methodologies used by the project developer. How data is collected is key, there is no question about it, and how accurate that data is reported, results in high quality and integrity carbon credits.

As new technology comes into the market, and it is embedded into the standards and methodologies, at Simoshi we had implemented a more analog monitoring system at the usage point, since the very beginning back in March 2016 when the first school joined our Project Activity.

To ensure 100 % usage rate of all the institutional improved cook stoves (IICS) deployed in the school kitchens, a census approach is taken, so we physically observe the IICS at least 6 times per year, while also collecting data on the name of the cooks operating them and the situation of the IICS for maintenance purposes. Then this data is entered into our Kenga IT infrastructure, that is later reconciled on a monthly basis and used for monitoring and reporting activities.

Any school that decides to include a new stove model outside the approved ones in the Project Design Document (stacking), or goes back to using a traditional 3-stone fire, is automatically disqualified and withdrawn from the Project Activity. Simoshi is the only cookstove project implementing such approach. And we have done this before the era of Internet of Things (IoT).

Today in 2024, we know exactly where our first schools are with their kitchens and IICS that were installed back in 2016. We collect so much detailed data, that we can disclose the history of who is cooking with those IICS, with name and surname (because every single cook signs our training sheets), how many children are fed, how much the school spends in Ugandan shillings on firewood every school term, and how much Simoshi spent and what was repaired on every individual IICS, for the past 8 years. These efforts are continuously deployed to ensure we achieve accuracy in our MRV exercises, while the voluntary sector innovates and evolves as a whole in the requirements needed to bring certainty.