About the Global Impact Fund
Launched in 2018, the Global Impact Fund is KKR’s dedicated lower-middle market private equity strategy seeking to help investors achieve meaningful financial outcomes by helping to solve unprecedented societal challenges. The Global Impact Fund invests around four core investment themes – climate action, lifelong learning, sustainable living, and inclusive growth – where we believe we can create value for our investors and contribute meaningful solutions to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Over the last decade, we have identified and pursued a number of commercial opportunities to invest in companies that we believe measurably contributed to solutions that address societal challenges across the globe. We aim to build on this experience and do more over time. Our global team – based in North America, Europe, China, India, Southeast Asia, and Australia -- combines local connectivity with the global resources of KKR in seeking to develop critical insights and relationships to better source, evaluate, and help create value within our global portfolio companies. We focus on opportunities where we believe we can leverage these insights and resources to help scale an existing business by investing more capital, creating better incentives, and supporting the improvement of business processes to deliver enhanced economic outcomes and impact.
Impact and ESG Management
In addition to seeking to maximize impact, we focus on opportunities where we believe we can optimize and improve ESG performance to produce meaningful outcomes, and aim to provide our investors and key stakeholders with transparency through high-quality reporting. We seek to use the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) industry standards as a primary input to determine a company’s most important, or material1, ESG issues, tailoring that guidance to each company’s unique circumstances. Our experience has indicated that proactive and thoughtful management of ESG and stakeholder issues can reduce risk, mitigate externalities, and deliver double bottom-line (i.e. economic and societal) benefit. The Global Impact Fund is committed to measuring and reporting the impact of its efforts in a manner that is (a) transparent and (b) leverages existing, proven frameworks. We define and measure each company’s contribution to one or more of the SDG targets using indicators from third-party reporting frameworks wherever possible, such as IRIS, SDG Compass, and the SDG target indicators. In 2021, we also published our first public impact brochure with excerpts and highlights from our full 2020 Impact Report, which is provided to Fund investors.
In April 2019, Global Impact became a signatory of the Operating Principles for Impact Management (“the Principles”), and used the Principles to identify areas of improvement as we were implementing our approach. In June 2021, we published our second annual Disclosure Statement and third party verification statement.
In 2009, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co L.P. became a signatory to the globally recognized voluntary framework of the Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) and helped to develop the American Investment Council Guidelines for Responsible Investing. We are actively involved with both organizations and continue to use these frameworks to help guide and align our efforts.
For more on our efforts related to managing ESG performance across KKR’s investments, visit www.kkresg.com.
1) On this page, we are not using such terms “material” or “materiality” as they are used under the securities or other laws of the U.S. or any other jurisdiction, or as they are used in the context of financial statements and financial reporting. Materiality, for the purposes of this document should not, therefore, be read as equating to any use of the word in other KKR reporting or filings.