This study presents the synthesis and application of aluminium and rhodium co-doped ceria for water gas shift (WGS) reaction and CO oxidation. The catalyst was synthesized using single step solution combustion method to obtain porous catalyst of relatively high surface area. The catalyst was characterized by various techniques. All the characterization results revealed successful substitution of the constituent dopants in ceria. The catalyst obtained was tested for its activity for WGS and CO oxidation. The catalyst exhibited higher catalytic activity in comparison to the other noble metal counterparts. A plausible dual site microkinetic model has been proposed in this study for WGS and CO oxidation over Rh/ceria based catalyst and a robust rate expression has been obtained. This rate expression in conjunction with the kinetic parameters and isothermal plug flow reactor model was used to predict the experimental CO conversion. As evident from the simulation results, the kinetic model developed in this study was able to predict the experimental trend with reasonable accuracy for both WGS and CO oxidation. © 2017 Elsevier B.V.