It is with great happiness that we announce that we became part of the amazing community of BCorp corporations. After a long process we finally got our certification with an outstanding score of 132!

B-corp what does it mean?

The B corp is like a medal for being a good corporate citizen. B corp members try doing things right for their employees, customers, and the planet. To earn the B Corp title, we had to go through a serious evaluation. We had to show evidence on how well Nazava treats its workers, how we impact our customers and the environment, and how transparent we are about our business practices. We even had to change a part of our business statutes to show our commitment will not waiver over time. This isn’t a one-and-done deal. Like all B Corps we will have to keep up the good work. We will need to recertify every three years to prove we are still walking the talk.

Why we wanted to be part of the B Corp community.

As a social enterprise we were already in the business of doing well by doing good. Becoming a B Corp helped us to improve and formalize what we were already doing.

Gain Trust on first Sight

We really liked the idea of putting the B-corp logo on all our communication stuff so that everyone – clients, investors, suppliers can see directly that we are a company that cares about making a positive impact. Not everybody will read our impact reports – you should- but everybody will see the B-corp logo!

Be part of the Olympics of sustainable Entrepreneurship

Being B-corp certified is like being part of the Olympic squad of sustainable enterprises. It shows that we at Nazava are walking the talk and that we encourage our suppliers to do the same thing. In the countries where we operate, namely Indonesia & Kenya very few companies are B Corp certified so we are excited to lead the way!

Learn from the other B Corp

We want to learn from the best. Our colleague B Corpers are the best. Other B Corps are for instance Patagonia, Tony Chocolonely, Ben and Jerry’s and Dopper. We want to learn from them. We are humbled to join the squad of like-minded companies who are all about making the world a better place. We can’t wait to share experience, knowledge and look for synergies.

 

Expand our dream team

Our mission is to provide everybody with safe drinking water everywhere by manufacturing the best and most affordable water filters. This sounds great but carrying it out often keeps us awake at night.

Our passionate team has been crucial in our success so far. To provide more people with safe water we need to grow our team of passionate, mission-driven individuals. With the B-corp certification we stand out to people who want to work for companies that have a purpose beyond profit.

The B-corp Process helped getting our house in order

The B Corp certification process was a deep-dive into how we are running our business. It forced us to look at everything from the supply chain to employee benefits. This was tough and during the process we often wondered if it was worth it. However, we found that the journey really helped us streamline operations and built effective procedures that last.

Funding

In order to make a real dent in the problem of safe drinking water, diarrhea and stunting we will need a lot more funding in the future. We need working capital for our operations and investments in our sales and marketing team. Many investors especially in the impact realm are now looking for the B corp logo. It saves them time on due diligence. We hope we will be able to get more funding, faster and with cheaper rates so we can supply more people with safe drinking water, faster.

Accelerate global impact

B Corp is global so are our dreams. Nazava wants to become the main supplier of household water filters for the low to middle income market. We are excited that with one arrow we can hit 3 targets and become members of the B-corp community in Singapore, Kenya & Indonesia. We hope that this certification can help us open doors in new markets to serve more customers in many more countries.

Our score of 132 explained.

Our score of 132 out of 200 is excellent. It is difficult to compare between B-corp but we put ourselves at the best 20%. Here is the breakdown of the score.

Governance (15.2/30)

• Mission & Engagement: 8.0/15
• Ethics & Transparency: 7.2/15

The governance score is an indicator on how institutionalized environmental and social issues are in every level of decision making. For example, are environmental issues part of job performance reviews? Is social performance a fixed agenda item at the Board of directors meeting? Nazava is a relatively small company and our main focus is sales and production. Because the production process does not have a negative impact on society or the environment we do not discuss this that often in our internal meetings. For that reason our score on this item is relatively low.

Workers (21.5/40)

• Financial Security: 10.0/20
• Health & Safety: 6.5/10
• Career Development: 5.0/10

The worker section dealt with how well we treat our employees ranging from salaries to safety on the work floor as well as career development. For a small company doing only limited manufacturing our health and safety procedures are in order. Career development is something that challenges us. We would love to see more upward movement in our workforce but so far we have not been very successful at this. Nazava however just hired a dedicated HR executive as well as a trainer so we hope they can help our employees move upward.

Regarding financial security our score is relatively low because besides the minimum wage B corpers are encouraged to pay a living wage. The issue is however that we could not determine the living wage for our employees without hiring expensive consultants so we decided not to claim that we pay our employees more than the living wage.

Community (15.5/40)

• Diversity & Inclusion: 7.5/20
• Economic Impact: 5.0/10
• Civic Engagement: 3.0/10

Our score on the community part is relatively low. In Java where we are located there are not really minority groups that need to be empowered so diversity is not a priority for us.

Because we focus on selling our water filters at the lowest possible price we do not donate money to charities. That would increase the price of our filters.

Environment (13.3/30)

• Environmental Management: 7.0/15
• Resource Conservation: 6.3/15

As we are a small company with only light manufacturing we do not use a lot of energy and we do not produce any wastewater or fumes. For that reason, we also do not have many policies in place to reduce energy use or wastewater. That is why we score less than 50% on this item. We put in place some goals that we want to achieve before the next verification round which include the monitoring and reduction of waste streams and the monthly monitoring and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

Customers (66.3/100)

• Customer Stewardship: 35.0/50
• Serving Underserved Populations: 31.3/50

Nazava water filters empower our customers, who are mostly mothers to filter their own water so it becomes safe to drink. By doing so our customers get healthier lives, safe money and valuable time. We track well to who we sell and we undertake customer surveys every year. These efforts are reflected in the excellent score that Nazava achieved for this part of the certification.

How did we do it?

The process took us around 1.5 years. We were very happy to have a more or less dedicated team member for B-corp namely Steven Ramsey who unfortunately has left Nazava. We will be forever grateful Steven; it would not have been possible without you! We were also assisted by pro-bono consultants from Danone to point out the most challenging parts.

The certification process consists of hundreds of questions for which you can earn points. An example of a question would be

What is the annual minimum number of paid days off (including holidays) for full-time employees?

• 0-15 workdays

• 16-22 workdays

• 23-29 workdays

• 30-35 workdays

• 36+ workdays

For this question you can earn a maximum of one point (36+ days). Paid days off at Nazava are in the low thirties which earned us 0.9 points.

Answering these questions is relatively easy, the hard part is collecting evidence for it. Evidence for this question includes labor contracts from Kenya & Indonesia (the two countries where Nazava has employees) as well as the number of public holidays in these two countries plus proof that we do not force employees to work on public holidays.

This doesn’t seem too complicated but imagine answering hundreds of questions like these. That is quite an effort!

Sometimes we decided to develop new practices and guidelines. We did for example not have confidentiality persons and employee representatives before we started the B Corp process. As this was already something we thought we should have, we held elections among the staff to choose representatives and confidentiality persons. This is an example of how the process made us a better company .

In some cases we decided to postpone measures until the next verification round. Examples of these are setting clear energy efficiency targets and monitoring those monthly.