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1,950 private/public commitments will help 300 million people over ten years

BY JEANETTE FRIEDMAN

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

While STAR magazine and other tabloids touted the confessions of a bimbo who said she got it on with Ashton Kutcher, and predicted the end of his marriage to Demi Moore, Kutcher and Moore were at the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) in Manhattan, where they formally announced their campaign to end sex trafficking in the United States. "Real Men Don't Buy Girls" is their message, and Kutcher told American men to get off their asses and do something. One in five American men buy sex, and 75% of the women in the trade are enslaved by their pimps. The average age of entry is 13, and it is not done by choice.

Kutcher told a packed house that Tuesday marked the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. While most Americans assumed slavery was over and done, he said, there are more people enslaved now than ever before in human history — 27,000,000 — most of them sex slaves, with 80% of them women and girls. In the United States alone, he noted, there are 1,000,000 sex slaves, one third of them children under 15, many of them stolen off the streets. He and others on the panel described a number of heartbreaking cases. You can watch the panel discussion here.

CGI (www.clintonglobalinitiative.org) is a gathering of world leaders, diplomats, CEOs, and just plain folks who are brought together to make commitments to repair the world. While world leaders and diplomats were meeting on Manhattan's East Side at the United Nations and talked but accomplished little, some of these same world leaders traveled across town to the Sheraton Center on the West Side, where in four information-packed days, in rooms filled with CEOs of major corporations and foundations, celebrities and workers from non-profit agencies from around the globe, people learned that simple solutions can often make the difference between life and death. In the last six years, CGI has raised $63 billion, $6 billion just this past week and will be affecting the lives of three billion people, including people in the United States.

CGI, an outgrowth of the William Jefferson Clinton Foundation, focuses on four "Global Challenge areas": Economic Empowerment, Education, Environment & Energy, and Global Health. As members file into seminars of particular interest to them, they are bombarded with facts and figures... from President Clinton, who has in his brain an enormous store of statistics he uses to build his case for just causes, to Ashley Judd, from former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to Ben Stiller.

Successful partnerships between CGI members were showcased in many of the seminars, and participants were publicly acknowledged for their efforts in diverse fields — from providing free college-level computer science courses at the University of the People (www.oupeople.org) or developing tolerance-building children's books in Jordan that can change cultures and promote gender-equality. The session can be seen here.

Micro-economics, using smart-phones and Wi-Fi to save lives in every corner of the planet, finding ways to prevent global warming with innovations in energy — including folding bicycles — the ideas flowed forth and success — and failures — were acknowledged. Among the commitments were those to projects here in the United States. Geoffrey Canada, who built charter schools in Harlem and changed a 97 block area from a slum into a neighborhood, described why and how he accomplished what he did. You can watch that session here.

New commitments were announced at the beginning of each session, and members were part of the panel discussions and breakout sessions. On the evening of the last day, a gala awards dinner was held at the Museum of Modern Art, hosted by Ben Stiller, that honored those who gave their best.

In discussing "Global Challenge Areas" attendees learned nothing could or would move forward if women and children weren't provided with basic education, health care, and economic opportunities. They learned that generally, in third world and developing countries, gender bias is a serious issue — leading to rape, HIV/AIDS and early death. Women work three times as many hours a day as men; are responsible for gathering wood for their stoves and finding potable water so they can care for their families. Very often, on their quests for fuel and water, women and girls are raped, especially in Southern Sudan and on the Rwanda/Congo borders. Rape is now used as a weapon of war, and thousands of women raped every month find no solace and cannot go home, for in their cultures they are blamed for what happened to them. The story repeats itself around the world. In the panel on securing the health and safety of girls and women, (http://www.clintonglobalinitiative.org/ourmeetings/2010/meeting_annual_multimedia_player.asp?id=8&Section=OurMeetings&PageTitle=Multimedia), in technology (http://www.clintonglobalinitiative.org/ourmeetings/2010/meeting_annual_multimedia_player.asp?id=19&Section=OurMeetings&PageTitle=Multimedia) and economic workshops, misogyny, bias and abuse of women were at the heart of the problem.

Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, special representative of the State Department to Pakistan and Afghanistan, says that all the programs to empower women will fail if the men are not hammered to change. "If you want to fix the problem of women in these areas...you have to address the men. This is the biggest single failure in all of our programs....I never see programs to shame and coerce the men, and the women fight back at the greatest risk... The problem runs from Afghanistan to Africa...Our programs aren't correctly structured. We have all these programs to train police and the army, and these women empowerment programs, and the biggest abusers are the police...but if they rape women and kidnap people and rip people off at self created road blocks, we will not succeed in Afghanistan."

P&G (Proctor and Gamble) committed to providing PUR packets — one ten-cent packet purifies one 10 gallon-jerry can of water — cutting down cholera, dysentery, and other water borne parasites and disease, while cutting time and distance to a water-source, lessening the risk of rape. But in Afghanistan there are no jerry-cans. People, mostly illiterate, don't know how to use the product, and methods need to be developed to convince them to drink the purified water, which often smells of chlorine.

Secretary of State Hilary Clinton described how three billion people use polluting stoves or open fires and as a result 2,000,000 people — half of them children — die from inhaling the toxic emissions. In announcing the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, the Secretary described new, cheap, solar stoves that would do away with the need to go far afield to seek fuel — and risk being raped. At the same time, the stand-alone portable stoves would reduce greenhouse gases, cancer rates, and demand on natural resources while creating local jobs to build them. The goal is to provide 100,000,000 clean cookstoves by 2020. The United States, in partnership with the UN Foundation, will provide almost $51 million for the project over the next five years.

At the closing plenary Bill Clinton had a conversation with Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft about polio, malaria, and other issues that are coming up. (You can see it here. At the end he asked a question: "Are we fools to be optimists?" and then pointed out that scientists had recently discovered that there were more positive subatomic particles than there are negative ones, and as one of members noted during the conference, the goal is to keep hope alive. "It's easy to look at the negative, but we have to stay positive," he said.