Star Power at a Global Women’s Conference

WASHINGTON â€" As the season peaked for international women’s conferences, with corporate sponsors, rich donors and celebrity supporters filling well-appointed halls, the Global Fund for Women celebrated its 25th anniversary at a gala dinner at Cipriani 42nd Street restaurant in New York.

After a calendar crammed with global women’s conferences in the United States and Europe, it could have been tricky to pack Cipriani, but the Global Fund affair sold out (a seat went for $500, a table for five $5,000 and up).

No wonder the high-profile lineup was topped by Hillary Rodham Clinton, a longtime ally of the Global Fund and this spring’s most sought-after speaker.

The fund, a multimillion-dollar nonprofit based in San Francisco, has given millions away in grants to women.

“It’s the largest fund for women around the world,” Musimbi Kanyoro, the fund’s president and chief executive, said on the phone from New York. “We have given $100 million in grants to 5,000 women’s organizations in 174 countries. That large amount of money is rarely targeted for women.”

Ms. Kanyoro, who was born in Kenya and is the daughter of a midwife, has a doctorate in linguistics from the University of Texas, Austin, and a degree in ministry and feminist theology from San Francisco Theological Seminary. She was a student when she joined the movement against apartheid, which led to her fight for women and girls.

“Our goal is the dignity of women, and that is achieved through human rights,’’ she said. “But we also believe that women need financial resources. We are especially effective reaching women who have no other donors, women in developing countries who are fighting for religious rights and fundamental sex and property rights.”

Shortly before the gala, I spoke with the activist and teacher Charlotte Bunch, founder of the Center for Women’s Global Leadership at Rutgers University in New Jersey, in whose name the fund started the Women’s Human Rights Defender Award.

Ms. Bunch, who has been on the front line of the fight against violence against women, said that sexual violence continues to be the biggest problem.

“Violence is horrific everywhere,” she said.

The next big challenge, she said, is economic inequality between high-earning women and poor women who are left behind in large part because of unfair policies. And the third big problem is the continuing struggle for reproductive and sexual rights.

Few know those issues as closely as Monica Roa, a recipient of a Women’s Human Rights Defender Award for her fight for judicial reform in her native Colombia. The founder of Women’s Link Worldwide, the 37-year-old lawyer broke ground when she figured out a way to navigate the legal system to help women and bring about social change.

“I saw in the law a tool for the liberation of women,” she told me.

Her uphill battles in the courts in Bogotá nearly killed her. Shots were fired and shards of glass fell on her head when she and colleagues were attacked for their efforts in an abortion case. That was seven years ago. She has since lived with death threats and bodyguards.

But she continues to press the courts, digging up unenforced laws and bringing them to judicial light. Now her work is followed in places like Peru and the Dominican Republic.

Women’s issues in South America and the Caribbean are a bit off the beaten path of international women’s groups, which tend to focus on the situations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and in the Middle East and Africa, places where women and girls are fighting for their most basic rights. Horrors like the rapes of young girls and other abuses and brutality in patriarchal fundamentalist countries overshadow the relatively more progressive situation in Latin America.

Yet, there’s plenty of sexual violence and slavery, human trafficking and other crimes against women and girls in Latin America, and reproductive rights are negligible. Abortion is illegal in most countries.

“People think that the struggle is over,” Ms. Roa said. “There’s a gap between what we have achieved on paper and the reality. Sexism is much more subtle. We need to develop strategies that work. In Latin America, there is a clear offensive against the rights of women.”

Fighting that war on women worldwide is what Mrs. Clinton calls “the great unfinished business of the 21st century: advancing the rights and the opportunities of girls and women.” It is the engine driving the multiplying star-studded women’s conclaves from Davos to London to São Paulo to New York. For these donor-supported and corporate-sponsored global organizations, there’s no turning back.