September 23, 2009 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Panels at the Clinton Global Initiative often avoid the hard issues that face charitable endeavors.
But the ABC News journalist Diane Sawyer added a tougher edge, pushing corporate and nonprofit leaders to discuss their failures in philanthropy and asking about the scarcity of resources.
The discussion focused on the so-called girl effect, the idea that whole nations improve when women and girls receive an education and other support.
While the panelists agreed on the importance of the concept, Ms. Sawyer wanted to hear practical details on what charitable efforts work and don’t work.
She asked Zainab Salbi, the chief executive of Women for Women International, and several other people how their efforts have fallen short and what they’ve learned.
Ms. Salbi said she preferred to focus on “challenges,” but Ms. Sawyer quickly rephrased her question: What is “something you have tried to do that didn’t work?”
Ms. Salbi said that convincing fathers in Africa and other parts of the world to abandon the tradition of dowries, which are often a key part of planned marriages, has not succeeded. Instead, she said women’s advocates need to convince them that educating their daughters by sending them to school will actually improve families financially more than a one-time wedding gift.
Ms. Sawyer also raised the issue of whether enough money was available for women’s programs, an issue that divided the panel between donors and fund raisers.
Lloyd C. Blankfein, chief executive of the Goldman Sachs Group, and Rex W. Tillerson, chief executive of ExxonMobil Corporation, said that the amount of money is not the key, but how effective that money is spent.
But Ms. Salbi, who of course needs to raise funds for her group, disagreed. She said that too little aid dollars are earmarked for women and girls.
