Frost vs Clark: Women need help

It wasn't quite Frost vs Nixon.

But when Britain's most distinguished television interviewer, Sir David Frost, interrogated Helen Clark yesterday, she had an admission of her own.

While Nixon famously apologised, in an interview with Frost, for the hurt he had caused the people of America in the Watergate affair, Clark acknowledged that governments of the world had failed to adequately empower women. She said she was determined to make up for the failings of the past, in her role as head of the UN development programme.

In the interview screened on Al Jazeera's international news channel yesterday, Clark said: "We're talking empowering women, that's a very important goal. The importance of improving maternal health, which is in a sad state in many parts of the world, and then the issue of equal access of women and girls to education, those are the big three where if we made progress we'd have ripple effects."