Mr. Kiu Jia Yaw

CSO-SDG Alliance

Jia Yaw is a practising lawyer. He serves as the Deputy Co-Chair of the Bar Council Environment and Climate Change Committee. He also serves as a Lead Coordinator for the All-Party Parliamentary Group Malaysia on the Sustainable Development Goals.

Jia Yaw was a Chevening Scholar, with a Masters in Environmental Law (LL.M.) from SOAS, University of London. Through the For-Purpose Enterprise Project, Jia Yaw works on advancing the thinking on social entrepreneurship. He advocates for businesses and governments to work towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.

"I love to think about how to overcome the adverse impacts of business. Not just on specific issues like factory emissions but also from a system-wide perspective.

I can’t get over the fact that we have hardly changed the way in which we organise business organisations, specifically, the design of our legal vehicles for business and the relationships between stakeholders. Our present structures still unequivocally assume that the supreme purpose of business is to maximise shareholder value.

An update in how we think about and design our business organisations is in order. One that reflects the values and principles underpinning the SDGs".

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