Davos women are gathered to listen to the likes of Arianna Huffington and the impressive Indonesian trade minister, Mari Pangestu, and to network amongst other women. Seemingly stuck at just 15 per cent of participants, the ‘tribe’ (as its referred to by Harvard prof Rosabeth Kanter)looks quite different all gathered together vs as a light sprinkling.  As I’m sitting down and slightly wondering what I need to be doing here for children, most of the women at the table tell me they happen to be Save the Children supporters – it’s great to be able to say thank you.

The Google party is even cooler this year with wetsuit, snorkel-clad waiters serving sushi, and coloured pure oxygen tanks for those in need of a blast. Media moguls, politicos, all the young global leaders and even some royalty hit the dance floor.

The accessibility of all these people is unparalleled.  People want to capitalise on that by following up afterwards and the biz card ritual is like nothing I’ve ever seen outside Japan.  I swear some measure success of their participation by how many inches of cards they collect and give out.

What does it all add up to?  For all the streams of work on health, hunger, education, disaster response – what’s really needed is some kind of framework for aggregating pledges today and outcomes tomorrow.  And a Google-type system for sharing knowledge about what works and what doesn’t.

This will be all the more glaringly needed at the next big global gathering in NY in September to review progress against the 8 Millennium Development Goals that must be reach by 2015. I’m sure some of the people at Davos could sort those web aps if they decided to.

The BBC’s Politics Show presenter Jon Sopel is moderating a discussion on cross-sector partnerships. I’m on the panel with Accenture and IKEA. Amazingly it’s a decent turnout at 7am (after a late night for most compounded with jet lag for many). Are NGOs and businesses converging? What will partnerships look like in another decade? Classic Davos fringe meeting. Encouraging levels of enthusiasm and a few new partnership ideas emerge.

I’m catching quick meetings with CEOs I’d struggle to get time with normally. So I miss what I hear was a great session on global talent mobility – a big issue for Save the Children.

Everyone without a minder admits to being triple booked and labouring under a sense of missed opportunities.

Rush to a different location (at least its stopped snowing) for session on ‘Redesigning a healthy start’. It’s actually pretty obvious what’s needed in terms of health, education and nutrition – so what’s holding things back? We even have the economic argument – a 5per cent reduction in child mortality leads to a 1per cent increase in economic growth.

On to another session, somewhat grandly entitled ‘Setting the global education agenda for the 21st century’ moderated by John Chambers of Cisco. The world is off track to achieve universal primary education by 2015. Debate as to what’s needed – more innovation or more accountability? Surely it’s both.

Here are further glimpses of the Davos kaleidoscope.

First, my friend Moises Naim, editor of Foreign Policy, gave me a new acronym on the global recovery. It is LUV. The L is for the L-shaped recovery of the European economies. The U is for the U-shaped recovery of the US economy. The V is for the shape of the recovery of big emerging economies.

This looks depressingly right to me. In particular, the eurozone seems to have decided on an adjustment to its huge internal imbalances that is loaded entirely on the weak countries of the periphery. But the periphery cannot adjust if the core – namely, Germany – does not adjust too, by expanding demand. Neither the ECB nor the German government seems to understand this simple point, though one coalition partner – the FDP – does seem to do so.

Second, the global attempt at addressing imbalances – the “mutual assessment programme” being orchestrated by the International Monetary Fund – may well run into the sand this year. That would be a great pity.

What is needed is political commitment at a high level. The concern is that, with the crisis largely over, the will to take on difficult issues – exchange rates, for example – will disappear. It was easy for everybody to agree to expand spending and ease monetary policy last year. Now it all gets harder. It would be depressing if top politicians forgot how close the world economy came to disaster just over a year ago. But they may well do so, all the same.

Third, the relationship between the US and China is widely accepted as central. These behemoths look quite similar. Both can respond well to crisis, but neither seems able to deal with long-term structural weaknesses. China’s failures centre on its over-reliance on investment and exports, the adverse shift in income distribution, away from households, and the extraordinarily low share of consumption in GDP. US failures are well-known, too: energy policy, for example. Welcome to the policy gridlock of Chimerica.

Fourth, I am increasingly concerned that stimulus – especially fiscal stimulus – will be withdrawn too soon. We must remember that the developed countries still have enormous slack in their economties. It is not clear that a withdrawal of fiscal stimulus would – or even could – be adequately offset by monetary policy.

Finally, I am listening to Lawrence Summers as I write. He has emphasised that we cannot maintain global integration if it is seen as a source of domestic disintegration. This tension – that between the global economy and domestic politics – is a central challenge of our time. It affects everything we try to do.

Although the conference dribbles on until Sunday morning, by Friday evening the tone has been set. So what is the verdict?

The mood is certainly better than last year, when the world was ending, but it is worse than at the beginning of last week. Alessandro Profumo of Unicredit acutely observed that Davos is likely to accentuate whatever mood you arrived in, rather as alcohol does, I guess. So those who arrived nervous about the economic prospects are leaving even more jittery. If you arrived feeling pessimistic, you will leave somewhere between suicidal and homicidal.

The market background has not helped. Anxiety about Greece has grown over the past three days. In the circumstances, it was strange to see both the Greek prime minister and his finance minister here. Maybe the subtext was to show that there can be no crisis if they are munching muesli in the mountains, but though some may have been reassured, more people asked who was at home minding the taverna.

On Friday I talked at the World Economic Forum about how I see the next 10 years as the Decade of Vaccines – a time when we will make more progress than ever on immunisations that save lives in the developing world.

The Decade of Vaccines will build on the phenomenal progress of the past 10 years. Since its creation in 2000, the GAVI Alliance has helped immunise more than 250m children in poor countries, averting 5m deaths and preventing a great deal of sickness and suffering. (You can read more about GAVI’s work in my 2010 Annual Letter, which was released this week.)

As fantastic as the past 10 years were, I think we can do even better during the next 10. I’m very optimistic that the Decade of Vaccines will see more innovation, with researchers developing new vaccines and finding ways to make sure that existing vaccines reach more people who need them.

This work will make it possible to save more than 8m lives by 2020. In addition to improvements in basic vaccines, such as measles and diphtheria, the next ten years will see progress toward developing vaccines for diseases such as AIDS and malaria.

No one can do this alone. Melinda and I hope that our commitment of $10bn for vaccines during the next decade encourages other donors to make their own new commitments. Saving more lives through vaccines will require even more new funding and stronger partnership between governments, pharmaceutical companies, nonprofits and other groups.