Our B Corp™ Certification

Our Impact

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A woman in Jaipur, India / Hiroko Hirota

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Gojo received its B Corp certification in January 2025. 

 This means that we meet high standards of social and environmental responsibility. The certification process involved the analysis not only of Gojo as a holding company in Tokyo, but also its majority-owned subsidiaries. As a part of a movement of for-profit organisations committed to creating a world of "People Using Business as a Force for Good®", Gojo is fully committed to positively impacting the lives of its end clients and key stakeholders.

Why B Corp?

Our commitment to the SDGs

Why B Corp?

Gojo has decided to join the B Corp movement and to apply for its certification in order to embark on a journey of continuous improvement in its social performance, while also participating in a community of like-minded businesses dedicated to this mission. As a certified B Corp, Gojo will undergo regular recertification (every 3 years, as applicable) and will strive to improve its performance score over time. 

The announcement was the result of a decade of work improving our social performance and years of cooperation with B Lab Global™  (“B Lab”), the issuing institution, to clear the requirements and achieve the certification. However, it was not work done for the sake of displaying a logo on our website: a positive impact on society, and especially on the financially excluded, is an imperative at the core of our business. From the very beginning, Gojo’s mission has been to extend financial inclusion across the globe, based on the belief that everyone deserves to determine their own future. We believe that inequality can be fought by empowering low-income individuals with the financial services they need, and by promoting inclusive economic growth. And we cannot do that unless we treat everyone involved fairly and listen to them—all stakeholders, from our employees to our communities and investors.

This kind of stakeholder engagement is what B Corp is about.

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Kids in Agra, India / Hiroko Hirota

Working with Our Stakeholders

Our commitment to the SDGs

Working with Our Stakeholders

To obtain the B Corp certification, companies must complete a B Impact Assessment™ and earn an audited minimum score of 80 out of 200 maximum points. At the time of signing the Declaration of Interdependence with B Lab, Gojo had reached a score of 102.8. According to the final assessment, Gojo performs especially well in its mission-centric governance and its positive impact on Customers, Workers, and Communities, scoring well above the average of the sector in all four of these categories.

The following is a breakdown of this score into its five major categories, based on our performance with each type of stakeholder and with our governance.

Score (2)

Customers
Our key focus is our net positive impact on our clients through financial inclusion, something enshrined in our corporate mission. This continuous effort is reflected in our score in the “Customers” category, by far the highest in our assessment with 50.0 points overall, out of a maximum of 80. We are not satisfied yet: our work to further improve how we serve and support our clients is detailed in the impact reports we publish every year.

Score (3)

Workers
Gojo’s score in the “Workers” category is 23.4 out of 50. Our Guiding Principles are a commitment, among other things, to transparency, ethical behaviour, and the value of each person’s personal and family life. We believe that the best employees are happy and committed employees, and this shows in our high sub-scores for employee satisfaction and engagement. At the same time, the assessment shows that we can and should do more to ensure all employees in our group, even in remote and potentially dangerous areas, are able to work in a safe and financially secure workplace.

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Community
We believe that financial inclusion, when high enough, brings positive indirect effects in the communities. When its members have the opportunity to contribute their part in the ways they choose—as opposed to the ways poverty forces them to—a community is stronger and more resilient as a whole. However, our direct impact on local communities is less impressive, as shown by Gojo’s relatively low score of 14.8/50 in the “Community” category. This is mainly due to an under-representation of women and minorities among our managers, something we’ve been working to improve for the past few years.

5

Environment
By the nature of its operations, Gojo and its group companies have a low environmental footprint compared to many other industries. Moreover, the financial situations of our clients make it difficult for them to prioritise greener initiatives with the money they borrow or save with us. Still, our low score in the “Environment” category, 2.9 points out of 50, is a strong signal for us to push harder in improving on this front. We will work to track our ecological footprint more accurately, controlling and monitoring our GHG emissions, and help our clients and business partners be gentler on the environment. Recent initiatives include monitoring our waste and recycling performance and prototyping loan products that increase resilience to climate change for clients in endangered regions.

3

Governance
The “Governance” category in our assessment has a score of 11.6 out of 25. This set of metrics looks at the company’s mission, its ethical, social and environmental engagement, and how well it protects these good intentions from the forces that tend to thwart them. Gojo performed particularly well in terms of ethics and transparency, keeping communication and information sources open to its employees and shareholders. Opportunities for improvement remain in how we evaluate our managers’ social performance, how our Board of Directors monitors our impact, and in the frequency and depth of our materiality assessments.

Verification and Accountability

Our commitment to the SDGs

Verification and Accountability

The certification process to become a B Corporation begins with the submission of a large amount of information about the company, answering detailed questions about each of the five categories detailed above. B Lab then assesses the company’s eligibility and next steps in what is called the Evaluation stage. If everything seems to be in order, B Lab thoroughly checks all the responses provided by the company based on proof such as internal documents and live interviews in a Verification stage. Finally, once everything is verified and if the score is high enough, the company signs their B Corp agreement with B Lab.

The certification is not a unidirectional process from the issuer to the company. By signing the B Corp agreement, Gojo legally committed, among other things, to the following:

  1. That we will strive to constantly improve our processes with and for our stakeholders.
  2. That we will undergo periodic recertification processes, updating and expanding our answers about all aspects of our business and impact.
  3. That we will maintain transparency about our B Corp metrics.
  4. Although Japan does not currently recognize legal forms equivalent to the “Benefit Corporations” or “Social Purpose Enterprises” of other countries, we will strive to follow those governance approaches in spirit, and avail ourselves of those legal mechanisms when they are eventually introduced in the country.

Gojo also signed a Declaration of Interdependence with B Lab, stating the following:

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Group-Wide Standards

Our commitment to the SDGs

Group-Wide Standards

Although the certification applies to Gojo the holding company, the scope of this detailed assessment covered all of the majority-owned group companies at the time of application, listed below:

  • MAXIMA Microfinance Plc.
  • Sejaya Micro Credit Ltd.
  • Microfinance Delta International Co., Ltd (MIFIDA)
  • Ananya Finance for Inclusive Growth Pvt. Ltd.
  • Prayas Financial Services Pvt. Ltd.
  • SATYA MicroCapital Ltd.
  • SATYA Micro Housing Finance Pvt. Ltd.
  • CJSC MDO "Humo"
  • Gojo & Company Innovation Asia Pte. Ltd.
  • Gojo Lanka Holdings Pvt. Ltd.

Out of these, we worked particularly closely with our larger microfinance companies: MAXIMA, Sejaya, MIFIDA, Ananya, Prayas, SATYA, and Humo*. Our overall score and performance are based on the hard work and commitment to the common good of these group companies. Special focus was put on the evaluation of our Indian companies—SATYA, Ananya, and Prayas—which together serve the majority of Gojo’s client base as of January 2025.

*Note that group companies are called “brands” in the B Corp terminology.

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A woman making a clay pot in Agra, India / Hiroko Hirota

Gojo’s approach to impact, as detailed on the Our Commitment page, involves a concerted effort of all involved parties. Gojo’s Social Performance Management and Impact Measurement (SPM&IM) team collaborates closely with its counterparts in each of the group companies, jointly monitoring their performance and assisting their projects. We also perform frequent visits to our branches and clients to witness the reality in the field, and hold regular client and employee satisfaction surveys. Standardised internal and third-party audits such as SPI5, and impact surveys such as 60 Decibels are also part of our continued efforts to understand and correct the effects we bring on all stakeholders.


Thanks to the detailed assessment provided by B Lab at the end of the certification process, we are now able to add several more action items to our plans. By leveraging the insights and cooperation of the B Corp community, we aim to keep improving our B Impact Assessment score at every recertification cycle.

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