Our impact agenda
The Agenda focuses on three themes across all our investments. These are:
Gender
Job Quality
Climate Change
Other impact work is specific to each company’s products, industry or community.
All investments have targets related to these three core themes, and each investment can also include a fourth impact theme depending on the sector or geography of the company.
| Impact Bucket | DPI’s approach to achieving this goal |
|---|---|
| Gender | Our third fund, African Development Partners III (ADP III), is the first 2X Flagship Fund committed to investing with a gender lens. 2X Flagship Funds are part of the 2X Challenge, a multilateral initiative launched by DFIs of the G7 countries to mobilise $3 billion to support projects that empower women and enhance their economic participation. DPI integrates gender considerations across all stages of its investment process using 2X criteria. We have also created an action plan to improve company performance against 2X criteria and implementation during the investment period. We are actively looking for investments in women-owned and founded businesses and working to increase the percentage of women in the workforce and leadership of our existing portfolio companies. |
| Job Quality | We partner with our portfolio companies to ensure their employees earn a decent living wage and have access to employee benefits by restructuring salaries and introducing benefits such as medical insurance, pension funds, and more. Employees at our portfolio companies are given access to wealth-building and career-building opportunities, as they can often hold shares in the companies and benefit from a performance feedback mechanism. |
| Climate Change | We work with portfolio companies to consider climate risk and resilience, ensuring they adopt environmentally friendly business practices. We help companies adopt new clean and renewable energy sources such as solar power and drive improved resource usage, efficiency, and security by using energy efficient systems and undertaking water conservation efforts and other green interventions. |
Years of doing this type of work has led to an understanding within the firm of appropriate training for the team, collegial work to deliver results and integration of investment guidelines with Impact and ESG factors. Simply put, our firm has done this work since inception, has learnt and become more sophisticated in delivering results and seeks to innovate to deliver more impact and ESG positive outcomes now through the DPIMS.
To deliver on our Impact and ESG work, DPI has a dedicated in-house Impact, Environmental, Social and Governance (IESG) team. The IESG team engages with portfolio companies to improve sustainability, drive DPI’s impact agenda and ensure ESG standards are met.