The fund, launched for institutional investors in 2022, focuses on investments to improve the wellbeing of children and supports several UNICEF programmes.
Triodos Bank UK has made the Triodos Future Generations Fund, which aims to make investments that benefit children around the world, available to retail investors via investment platforms and through the bank itself.
Managed by Triodos Investment Management (Triodos IM), the investment arm of Triodos Bank, the fund has been open to European investors and UK institutional investors since its launch in March 2022. Triodos donates the equivalent of 0.1% of the fund’s net asset value per year to support UNICEF programmes. The fund has €38m of assets under management.
“An increasing number of companies are no longer just looking at shareholder value, but at the interests of all stakeholders. We believe future generations belong on that list of stakeholders, and this is why the fund has been set up to support that long-term vision,” Sjoerd Rozing, a manager for the fund, said.
It is the fourth fund that Triodos IM has offered to UK retail investors, joining the Triodos Global Equities Impact Fund, Triodos Pioneer Impact Fund and Triodos Sterling Bond Fund. All are classified as Article 9 funds under the EU’s Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR), given they each focus on achieving a specific sustainability goal.
Triodos said the actively managed fund aims to generate “positive impact and healthy financial returns” by investing in a global portfolio of listed small and midcap companies active in health and wellbeing, education, equal opportunity, access to basic services, and/or safety. It invests in 30-40 companies of various sizes across different sectors and regions with the aim of making long-term investments.
Portfolio and UNICEF collaboration
Portfolio companies highlighted by Triodos include US education services provider Stride, children’s orthopaedic devices producer OrthoPediatrics, and Sobi, a Swedish company developing treatments for rare diseases.
The UNICEF donation supports specific programmes such as the “Building bricks for the future” project in Cote D’Ivoire which tackles the challenges of waste management and education by transforming plastic waste into bricks which can then be used to build classrooms.
Triodos IM is also working on a separate project with UNICEF to develop a tool enabling investors to better integrate children’s rights into ESG assessments.
Sandra Visscher, Executive Director UNICEF Luxembourg, said that, although children comprised nearly one-third of the world’s population, investors’ human rights policies seldom reflected considerations businesses needed to make to respect children’s rights.
“We believe that this collaboration helps to put children’s rights more clearly on the investor agenda and encourage integration of children’s rights into ESG decision-making processes across the investor world,” she said.
