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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.