#CGI2013: Girl Power

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the subject of endless speculation over whether she will or won't run for the White House in 2016, made it very clear today how she plans to focus much of her time for the next two years. Speaking from the main stage of her family's power-philanthropy conference, the once and possibly future presidential hopeful said she will lead an international effort to evaluate progress made in empowering women and girls worldwide. "Whether we are talking about empowering and connecting women in economics or health care or education or politics, it all comes back to a question of the full and equal participation of women versus their marginalization," Clinton said.

Referring specifically to the 1995 United Nations summit of 189 countries on women in Beijing, where she led the U.S. delegation as First Lady, Clinton said there is much work yet to be done. The Beijing summit, she said, had been "a call to action for the global community to insure that women and girls everywhere finally have the opportunities they deserve to live up to their god-given potentials and contribute fully to the progress and prosperity of their societies." But while more girls are now in school and more women hold jobs and serve in public office, Clinton said, "it is still not enough. ...Women and girls still comprise the majority of the world's unhealthy, unfed and unpaid, marginalized in so many ways."

The year 2015 will mark 20 years since that conference in Beijing, officially known as the Fourth World Conference on Women. "It's time for a full and clear-eyed look at how far we have come and how far we still have to go, and what we plan to do together about the unfinished business of the 21st century: the full and equal participation of women," Clinton said. Since the Beijing summit, she said, "we've built an international architecture of laws and norms to protect women but it remains a bare scaffold without the bricks and mortar needed to make those laws effective in people's lives and turn our rhetoric into reality."

Clinton said her Beijing+20 initiative will work through the Clinton Foundation and leverage the convening power of CGI to bring together partner organizations, NGOs, international institutions, governments, businesses and others to evaluate global progress towards gender equity in time for the September 20, 2015 anniversary of the Beijing summit. She said Beijing+20 will also tap new online feminist networks and social media to encourage broad and global input and participation.

The move was generally lauded by political pundits in Washington, who said that throwing herself into the work of her foundation will give Clinton the ability to add to an already formidable network of donors and keep herself current in the national conversation. According to a report by NPR correspondent Mara Liasson, the Ready for Hillary superPAC announced today that it has reached 1 million Facebook supporters.

Clinton isn't the first women's rights advocate to push for a formal assessment of how far UN member states and other stakeholders have come in implementing the commitments made at the Beijing summit 20 years ago. In July, the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) adopted a resolution proposed by the Commission on the Status of Women to begin its own review.


-- Marcia Stepanek

[Photograph: Hillary Clinton, announcing her Beijing+20 initiative at #CGI2013]

Women Deliver

Watch this week's Women Deliver conference livestreamed from Washington, D.C. Featured speakers include Melinda Gates, United Nations Secretary-General Ban ki-moon and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, managing director of the World Bank. The global conference runs through Wednesday in Washington, D.C.:

Watch live streaming video from womendeliver at livestream.com

Heat

Bill Clinton's fifth annual, star-studded thinkfest on philanthropy, technology, social issues and cause advocacy—the Clinton Global Initiative—kicked off today in Manhattan with a call for renewed urgency amid the global financial slowdown to create ever-more innovative, cross-sector solutions to climate change, poverty, and other global social ills. Clinton urged the record 1,200 attendees from the worlds of business, government, social advocacy, celebrity, and academia to forge more cost-effective and collaborative problem-solving initiatives, and to view emerging economies around the world as critical proving grounds for new ideas that can scale globally.

This is the fourth consecutive CGI I've attended; Bill Clinton, bowing to last year's collapse of the financial markets, has put special emphasis this year on society's overlooked populations—namely, the so-called "bottom billion"—and has scheduled panels to explore how business CEOs might do a better job working alongside social sector leaders to help local communities. To that end, ABC's Diane Sawyer will moderate a panel Wednesday that looks at how various countries treat women, followed by several sessions on human trafficking. Organizers also are promising some conversations about how the emerging mobile Internet—cellphones—can be a force for grassroots change, economic empowerment and collaboration from Kigali to Queens.

This year also will be different in another way: a record number of bloggers will be included in the press room, and there will be quite a few "citizen journalists" among the conferees; the ubiquitous Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore, philanthrocapitalist Jaqueline Novogratz, actors Matt Damon and Ben Stiller, and philanthropist Steve Case (@SteveCase) are among those already tweeting their takes on the proceedings. CGI, meanwhile, is livestreaming much of the event, and is providing an easy interface for members of the public to ask questions of Clinton and other participants.

Watch this space for highlights from the week; much of the program will be unfolding during simultaneous break-out sessions and town hall-style seminars taking place on Wednesday and Thursday. Some of the sessions will be live-streamed over the Web. Cause Global will be tweeting from the floor and during some of the breakout sessions. You can follow our CGI tweets @CauseGlobal through mid-day Friday.

For the opening plenary, which includes President Obama's speech to conferees, click HERE. In that speech, Obama referenced the social advocacy work of his late mother, Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro:

[My mother] was an anthropologist who dedicated her life to understanding and improving the lives of the rural poor, from Indonesia to Pakistan. Whether working with USAID or the Asian Development Bank, the Ford Foundation, Bank Rakyat in Jakarta or Women’s World Banking here in New York, she championed the cause of women’s welfare and helped pioneer the micro loans that have helped lift millions from poverty. My mother understood that whether you live in the foothills of Java or the skyscrapers of Manhattan, we all share common principles: justice and progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings. And we all share common aspirations, for ourselves and our children: to get an education, to work with dignity, and to live in peace and security.

(Photo: Mills/New York Times)