KCB Group, Kenya’s largest bank by assets, is setting up a medium term note programme of up to 2.3 billion dollars over five years, about 300 billion Kenyan shillings, to push more money into environmental and social work across East Africa. The notes will be issued by KCB Bank Kenya under a new Sustainability Bond Framework, once regulators and the market give the go ahead.
Group chief executive Paul Russo unveiled the framework at the KCB Leadership Centre in Karen on Wednesday. He said banking is about enabling progress, and that the bank’s duty now includes deciding not only how much capital it raises, but where that money goes, what it makes possible, and what lasting change it leaves behind. The idea, he said, is to take sustainability out of mission statements and into the actual flow of funds.
Money raised under the programme will be set aside for green, blue and social projects. KCB will track how the cash is used and report on the results. Green projects will back a low carbon and climate ready economy, including solar and other renewable power, energy efficient buildings, cleaner transport, sustainable farming, and water and wastewater systems. Blue financing will go to marine and coastal ecosystems and to work that helps coastal and freshwater communities cope with shocks. Social financing will reach people who are underserved, through affordable housing, small and medium businesses, women and youth led firms, jobs and livelihoods.
Russo pointed to the KCB Foundation’s 2Jiajiri programme as proof that access to capital can create work, grow enterprises and lift household incomes. East Africa still needs huge sums for infrastructure and growth while it lives with climate stress, food insecurity, joblessness, inequality and a shortage of affordable long term finance. He said the region has real openings in infrastructure, agriculture, manufacturing, energy, housing, healthcare, education, technology and trade, but that sustainability has to sit inside how capital is handed out.
The bank has been building this approach for nearly twenty years. It tied sustainability into the business in 2008 around financial, economic, social and environmental pillars, published its first sustainability report in 2009, and widened its link to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals from nine goals in 2017 to fourteen of the seventeen today. In 2019 it adopted the UNEP Finance Initiative Principles for Responsible Banking. In 2020 KCB Bank Kenya became the first Kenyan bank accredited by the Green Climate Fund. It later pledged net zero emissions by 2050 through the Net Zero Banking Alliance in 2021 and joined the Forward Faster Initiative in 2023.
Moody’s gave the new framework a Sustainability Quality Score of 2, rated Very Good. Russo said the design rests on capital, purpose and accountability. The aim is to raise money at scale, send it to the projects East Africa needs, and show clearly what that money achieves. The real test of sustainable finance, he said, is not the size of the bond but the scale of the change it produces, measured in lives improved, businesses strengthened, ecosystems protected, jobs created and chances opened. For Zoyols News, the launch is KCB’s latest attempt to tie the region’s capital markets to work that can make East Africa greener, more resilient and more inclusive.
