Innovations also help to make a difference.
"Refuge and Women's Aid are struggling to make a difference but we can't do it on our own, we need proper government funding and commitment to get sex and healthy relationships education into every school in the UK," she said.
But even weaker moments -- like the melodramatic story of aid groups struggling to make a difference called "On the Side of the Angels" by Richard Bean or the stiff, unconvincing "Now Is the Time" by Joy Wilkinson about the flight of the King of Afghanistan in 1929 -- add to our insights of the country as a whole.
With infrastructure essentially ripped to pieces and aid organizations clamoring to make a difference, keeping track of who is affected can feel like a Sisyphusian task — one step forward, two steps back.
With Band Aid, Live Aid and Farm Aid, pop stars tried to make a difference in peoples' lives, and with songs that touched on the problems in Northern Ireland and South Africa, U2 was astonishingly adept at transforming heady topics into No. 1 singles.
But it could take half that time for international aid to arrive in sufficient amount to make a difference.
Karl Ziegler, a banker in Africa for 17 years and a founding member of the anti-corruption group Transparency International in the UK, believes that no amount of aid, debt relief or trade is going to make a difference until the problems of corruption are solved: "Corruption is problem number one, two and three on that continent".
Even with the right ingredients -- the will, the resources and the on-the-ground know-how to make a difference -- the recipe for effective aid can still flop.
For many districts, the news that Albany had agreed to boost school aid statewide by $420 million, including $73 million for Long Island schools, came too late to make a difference.
