Nota bene: These are a few highlights from CGI – please do add your inspirations/ideas in the comments!

Clinton Global Initiative – Making things happen through Commitments

Action speaks louder than words. At CGI, you’ve got to commit – and that has an amazing impact.

What will your commitment be?

CGI was the birthplace, in past years, of projects like Matt Damon’s water program (water.org, expanding this year to Haiti), the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women Initiative, and so many more. In the five years of CGI, there have been 1,400 commitments made (participants are required to make commitments to existing projects or commit to creating new projects), valued at $46 billion dollars, and impacting the lives of 200 million people in 150 countries. This year’s meeting will give birth to 30 more of these programs – more by Andrew Mersman over at Passport Magazine/ Change by Doing blog.

Check out CGI Commitments here.

Innovation!

Business Week highlighted innovation as a top priority for the global economy, and President Obama announced a new strategy for innovation: A Strategy for American Innovation: Driving Towards Sustainable Growth and Quality Jobs. Download white paper.

Judith Rodin of the Rockefeller Foundation identified innovation strategies that could be applied to social problems – user-driven innovation, crowd sourcing and collaborative competitions reported here by Alexandra Cheney at Fast Company.  And Innovate Today: 8 Ways Business can End Poverty - superb post by Steve Enders over at tonic.

A few people – including Muhammed Yunus and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala of the World Bank at CGI had an Innovation Wish List. Yunus talked about the edible yogurt pot, and Judith Rodin announced a new initiative to help the poor – the Global Impact Investing Network. This gets my vote for one of the most exciting developments to come out of CGI – read the Economist article.

Investing in Women and Girls

Women make up half of the world’s population, but do 2/3 of the world’s work, produce 50% world’s food, earn 10% world’s income, own 1% of world’s property.

Development aid spending around the world is failing to adequately account for women and girls’ needs, with less than one penny of every dollar allocated for girls, according to the Clinton Global Initiative. A lack of political will and failure to effectively tailor existing programs to local needs are some of the challenges associated with the problem – reported from UN Wire.

It’s a failure of will, says Zainab Salbi of Women to Women International here

I agree with Pamela Shifman at the NoVo Foundation, who says “a growing body of evidence [shows] that when half the population is oppressed and not able to participate in society, it hurts not only girls and women, it hurts everyone.” Read more of this article in Rebuilding the Global Economy – Will Women Lead the Way? for a thoughtful analysis by Katherine Gustafson at tonic

Some very interesting points from Lisa MacCallum of the Nike Foundation. Read more here.

1. Specific solutions for girls. The unique needs of girls are getting lost in the broader focus on women and youth, so we have to be specific about solutions for girls. For example, girls are five times more likely to die in childbirth than women in their 20s and they have less access to health and social services.
2. Invest directly. Investing in girls doesn’t mean investing only in girls. Take a look at your current programs and figure out whether they directly reach vulnerable adolescent girls. No matter your focus, girls can be a powerful part of the solution, or accentuate your problem.
3. It’s urgent: Get to her by 12. She arrives at adolescence in a pretty healthy state, and it goes sideways from there. If we don’t reach her by age 12, we will be investing in a treatment cycle rather than more cost-effective prevention methods.
4. Count her: Regardless of institutional size, ask for your reports and your data to be disaggregated by age, gender and marital status at a minimum. Girls will remain invisible in development efforts until we demand to see them.

Goldman Sachs says Women offer the highest Return on Investment, and here’s their 10,000 Women Initiative. 10,000 Women fosters economic development by providing high-quality management and business education, wrap-around services, and access to capital for underserved women entrepreneurs. The initiative involves more than 60 of the world’s leading academic and nonprofit institutions which are teaching in 16 countries that include Brazil, China, India, Nigeria, and Kenya. Read more of the article by Alice Korngold here at fastcompany.

And the Wall Street Journal says Investing in Women is Key to the Global Economic Recovery. The role of women took center stage at this week’s annual Clinton Global Initiative in New York with supporters such as Goldman Sachs Inc. (GS), Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM), General Mills (GIS), Nike Inc. (NKE), and Jennifer and Peter Buffetts NoVo Foundation launching multi-million-dollar commitments toward business training, technology and ending abuse and trafficking of millions of women and girls.

UNAIDs with other partners launched a major campaign against sexual violence against girls and women. And the ManUp campaign will use hip-hop and soccer to tackle gender violence around the 2010 World Cup.

An Innovative Online Community to Support Girls and Women – In 75 villages in Malawi, Join My Village is setting out to drive measurable and long-term positive impact with women and families in Africa by tapping into the inherent power of women to connect with, and provide strength for, other women. Echoes of the Guardian.co.uk newspaper’s reporting on AMREF and Barclay’s work with Katine village in Uganda. And let’s not forget Jeffrey Sachs Millennium Villages

Interesting thoughts

Forget the Bottom of the Pyramid – Introducing the Global Majority.. How can you call 4 billion people the bottom of the pyramid? Diana Ayton-Shenker at change.org reframes our thinking in this interesting post

A Tool to Measure Sustainable Return on Investment - The SROI Decision Tool is a four-step process that allows public decision makers to measure an initiative’s sustainability by assigning monetary values to environmental, social and economic impacts, known as the “triple bottom line.”

Empty Gift Bags and Global Give Back Circle… Alice Korngold at 3bl MEDIA writes ‘Clinton said “This is the only conference you’ll ever attend where the gift bags are empty.” The idea is to GIVE BACK!

CGI in the Reset Economy.. Not sure whether he is coming down with a cold, or whether the mood of CGI has completely changed as a result of the seismic events of 2008 in the global financial and political spheres, Mitch Nauffts at PhilanTOPIC has some thoughts on the importance of CGI.

Related articles by Zemanta

• CGI: Investing in Girls and Women (one.org)