A conversation with... Graham Clark

Graham Clark is Chief Executive of Asia Affinity Holdings Ltd (Indonesia)

Tell us about your organisation.
We work with small communities and SMEs. Our focus is to originate business — setting up everything from mutual aid groups to cooperatives — then enable them with technology and protect them with insurance, which is our core business.

In Japan, we help build mutual aid cooperatives from scratch, sometimes starting with just a hundred people and growing from the grassroots upwards. In Indonesia, we run a foundation supporting around 2,500 cooperatives, originally set up by the World Bank after the 2004 tsunami. That’s given us a real gateway into grassroots communities, which are the life and breath of society.

We also farm seaweed in Indonesia – that’s about climate, carbon, and food security — and we have a technology business that underpins cooperative ecosystems. So our role is unique: we’re there from community origins through the value and supply chains.

What impact do you see on the ground in those communities?
The big thing is sustainability. Donor funding can be well-intentioned, but once the money stops, it takes hope with it. What makes a real impact is helping people build ongoing businesses. That means going beyond liquidity. 

Education is crucial. Many grassroots communities in Asia have had little or no formal education, so we teach not just “do you want to borrow money?” but also “what does a loan mean, how do repayments work, how do you transact financially?” 

The spirit of cooperation is very different from pure commercial enterprises, and it’s why the cooperative model has such potential for scale and resilience, particularly as supply chains today are no longer vertical silos, they’re ecosystems. Traceability connects every actor across that ecosystem.

What are your hopes for CM50?
For me, CM50 is about advocacy and raising the bar. We’re faced with huge global challenges: how do we feed 11.5 billion people by 2050, how do we finance it, how do we address poverty and climate simultaneously? CM50 brings together leaders from around the world to ask: what do the Sustainable Development Goals look like post-2030? Some, like Life Below Water (SDG14), get little funding, yet oceans are critical to food security.

It’s also about giving CEOs space to think beyond their immediate businesses. Ninety percent of their time is spent on returns and performance. CM50 creates room for them to exchange ideas and build frameworks for collaborative impact.

What would you like the CM50 to achieve in Doha?
First, asks around education. It underpins everything and has to be delivered at the national level. Second, liquidity at the grassroots. Development banks play a role at the sovereign level, but SMEs in sectors like fisheries or agriculture are too risky for traditional finance. They need guarantees or mechanisms that de-risk investment, so that capital can flow to where the action is. This isn’t about handouts. It’s about creating conditions for long-term sustainability.

How do cooperatives build a better world?

By demonstrating what it looks like to build a modern people-centred system from the ground up. If we can do that, then cooperatives won’t just be reacting to problems. They’ll be shaping solutions — for food security, for livelihoods, and for communities everywhere.