How audit firms failed to identify or report on sexual harassment and abuse at Wildlife Work’s Kasigau Corridor REDD project in Kenya

An anonymous auditor spoke to KHRC and SOMO.

In November 2023, SOMO (the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations based in the Netherlands) and the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC) published a report about sexual harassment and abuse at the Kasigau Corridor REDD project in Kenya. One of the topics covered in the report was the failure of the auditing system to uncover the systemic abuse of power going back to 2011.

A recent article by SOMO and KHRC titled “Greenlighting Abuse” investigates the problems with the auditing system.

One of the auditors of the Kasigau project spoke to SOMO and KHRC on condition of anonymity. They give the auditor the pseudonym “Ernst Wood” to protect their identity.

When Ernst visited the project, Wildlife Works held two certificates: the Verified Carbon Standard; and the Climate, Community and Biodiversity (CCB) Standards. Both are issued by the Washington DC-based carbon certification company, Verra.

SOMO and KHRC write that,

Audits are the main tool used by carbon certification schemes like Verra to monitor the environmental, social, and human rights impacts of offsetting projects. Wildlife Works has long held up its CCB label as proof that its operations at Kasigau go well beyond basic social safeguards by ‘empowering’ the local community – especially women – through jobs and various development initiatives, known as ‘co-benefits’.

The auditor’s story

Ernst told SOMO that he heard stories of senior men in the project management trying to coerce junior female colleagues into having sex with them. However, he did not include the allegations in his report because “no one would go on the record”. Employees would only share their stories in confidence.

Ernst heard that a female employee who asked for an advance on her salary was told “she had to ‘earn it’ by providing sexual favours”. Another woman had allegedly been “pressured repeatedly to sleep with a more senior colleague”.

Ernst told SOMO that staff members,

“and especially junior staff, seemed unable to speak freely. I had the impression that they had been told what to tell us and were afraid to defy these instructions. While I tried to convince them that they could share problems with me, I left those interviews feeling they were afraid to open up.”

Ernst said that community members, “who benefit from project carbon revenues are less likely to share [problems], as doing so may risk the continuation of project benefits”.

Ernst told SOMO that “it’s very limited what we can find out in such a short period of time”.

Ernst saw no other option than to write his report without referring to the allegations he had heard. “But he left Kasigau feeling deeply unsettled,” SOMO and KHRC write, “suspecting something was seriously wrong at the project”.

Between 2013 and 2022, teams from four US-based auditing firms visited the Kasigau Corridor REDD project. These firms were Environmental Services, Inc., SCS Global Services, S&A Carbon, and Aster Global Environmental Solutions. Each of them interviewed dozens of employees and community members. None reported anything about sexual harassment or abuse.

In their recent article, SOMO and KHRC write that,

Yet, as community members told KHRC and SOMO, it was an open secret among employees and the wider community that, in the words of one interviewee, women were “treated as sex objects” at Wildlife Works, and that the perpetrators got away with it by “intimidat[ing] everybody”.

SOMO and KHRC highlight four reasons for the failure of the auditing system - which “appear inherent in the system”:

• the power imbalance between local people (both employees and other members of communities) and carbon project developers;

• the limitations placed on auditors, restricting the scope of their reviews;

• the auditors’ bias in favour of the project developers who are their clients; and

• the conflict of interest in the relationship between auditors and project developers.

SOMO and KHRC conclude that,

Sexual harassment and abuse and a culture of fear created by a HR manager were a reality at Kasigau. Audit firms repeatedly failed to identify or report on this reality. These firms operate within a system and to a standard that made it seem impossible for at least one auditor to raise their serious concerns about women’s safety at Kasigau.

Ernst Wood spoke to KHRC and SOMO because he worries that the people who end up paying the price for the structural shortcomings of the auditing system are those who are often already marginalised. He wants to see the damage done by the system repaired.

Individuals like Ernst play a critical role in bringing the truth to light, but it is not easy for them to do so. This is because both the carbon offsetting industry and the carbon certification industry are exactly that: industries, governed by competitive pressures, profit objectives, and private interests.

An irreconcilable and dangerous tension exists between such business pressures, on the one hand, and the rights of communities and workers on the other. And this means that even auditors such as Ernst, who are willing to ask tough questions, lack the tools and means to protect and support communities.

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