By Andrew  Zolli
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the interviewer and interviewees.

The post-election crisis in Ivory Coast has been transformed from a political standoff to a humanitarian catastrophe. Ethnic groups loyal to strongman Laurent Gbagbo and those loyal to president-elect Alassane Ouattara have clashed with horrifying results: so far the Red Cross has discovered 800 bodies in one village alone; the U.N. discovered another 118, many burned alive.

While Gbagbo’s arrest on April 11 represents a turning point in the crisis, this shockwave of violence has created a refugee crisis in neighboring Liberia, as an estimated 100,000 Ivorians have poured over the border into the country in recent weeks. Their arrival has overwhelmed the already fragile and under-resourced rural public health system in southeastern Liberia.

2010 Social Innovation Fellow Dr. Raj Panjabi and his colleagues are on the front lines of this unfolding crisis. Their community-based health organization, Tiyatien Health, is working with the Liberian Ministry of Health and other partners at one Liberian district hospital and sixteen clinics in some of the areas most seriously affected. We spoke to Panjabi and Dr. Yesero Kalisa, Tiyatien Health’s Clinical Director, who are heroically trying to provide care at the only hospital in the county, Tubman Hospital.

PopTech: What are you seeing on the ground right now?
Yesero Kalisa: There are now more than 30,000 Ivorian refugees in Grand Gedeh, the county where we operate on the border with Ivory Coast. We’ve been seeing a rapid increase in refugees since January. Our small rural hospital, with only 80 beds, has been overwhelmed. People have been arriving with all manner of problems: gunshot wounds, injuries suffered in the wilderness, severe malaria, diarrhea, and worst of all, malnutrition. We’re running dangerously out of food.

Raj Panjabi: We lost a two-week old child last night in the hospital from hunger because the mother could not afford food and her breast milk had ceased.

YK: And that doesn’t begin to address the mental health issues. People are profoundly traumatized.  Some of our patients have told stories of witnessing their relatives massacred, raped and burned alive in a report just released by Human Rights Watch from Grand Gedeh.

PT: What do you need most urgently right now? How can people help?
RP: Immediately, we need help in three areas: we urgently need 2-3 international medical volunteers to help support our team on the ground. We need cash and airline miles to help get them into the field. And we critically need resources to help us purchase a vehicle to provide ambulance services to refugee mothers suffering from obstructed labor and those with gun shot wounds. Our community health worker teams are identifying these individuals in camps and villages, but we need a way to get them to hospitals and clinics.

Right now, $75,000 would transform our efforts. Unfortunately, we’re putting all of our resources into providing care, so we don’t have a lot of additional bandwidth for fundraising and advocacy. Anyone interested in helping us can learn more on our website Tiyatien Health.

PT: Raj, you’ve described this as “refugees taking care of refugees”. Can you elaborate?
RP: Sure — but to do that, I need to provide a little history:

People may know that Qaddafi supported and trained Charles Taylor in the 1980s to spark Liberia’s civil war, which sent my family and many of the people who now work with us at Tiyatien Health fleeing into exile for over 14 years.

In 1990, when Taylor attacked in southeastern Liberia, nearly 90% of the people in our region were displaced into Ivory Coast — just the reverse of what’s happening today. These Liberians spent 15 desperate years as refugees in Ivory Coast.  Only recently, have they started to return to rebuild our country.

Our organization, Tiyatien Health, was founded in 2007 by these former Liberian refugees who survived our civil war.  Many were our patients, but have since become trained as community health workers. And, today, they — as former refugees — are providing health care and other basic services to refugees from Ivory Coast who once housed and sheltered them.

YK: Because of this shared history, the reception the Ivorians have received has been very warm. For example, many nurses in the hospital, who are otherwise working around the clock, are hosting refugees with their families. But there are limits to what they can do. The hospital and the surrounding communities are suffering a critical food shortage.

PT: Beyond the humanitarian dimensions, what do you see as the larger consequences of this crisis?
RP: Five years ago, Liberians told the world they were tired of war when they elected Africa’s first female President, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. In five short years, President Sirleaf has turned the country around — from hell on Earth to what has become a place of hope. The international community views Liberia as a model for post-conflict recovery — an opportunity to get it right in Africa.

In six months, President Sirleaf will be up for re-election, but the conflict in Ivory Coast threatens to destabilize the election. Inaction on this crisis now threatens this progress and stands to rebuke all who would dream of similar progress in other post-conflict regions.

The Q&A can also be found here on PopTech’s website.

Photos, top to bottom: Ivorian refugee at Tubman Hospital; Dr. Raj Panjabi (left) and Dr. Yesero Kalisa (right) at Tubman Hospital in Zwedru, Liberia; Ivorian refugees crossing the border into Liberia. Credit: Tiyatien Health

Hill, who is the founder of TreeHugger.com, which is now a part of the Discovery network, is on a mission to help everybody get rid of all the unnecessary clutter in their lives. In New York City, this is particularly essential if you want to remain sane. A good way to start is by “ruthlessly editing,” as Hill says, your minimal personal space in a green way. Speaking from personal experience, it also clears some (much needed) space in your mind.

In New York, this shouldn’t be so hard to do. In fact, stripping your belongings down to the bare essentials is a regular occurrence given the limited space of most apartments and the fact that various furry — and not so furry — freeloaders find clutter to be a perfect place to set up home, as I recently discovered.

Life Edited’s motto is “make room for the good stuff,” and I have to say, simpler living definitely makes for a happier and easier life: there’s less to worry about. So, even if you aren’t that concerned about the greater environmental good, do it for yourself. And, in turn, you’ll be contributing to a larger cause. It’s interesting that sometimes a selfish act can help accomplish a more altruistic goal.

Like many celebrities these days, Legend wants to — and does — leverage his success for a worthwhile cause. His introduction to education reform came from retired Giants running back Tiki Barber, who is a Harlem Village Academy board member. Ever since Legend met Kenny and visited one her schools, he was hooked.

“I was inspired by the success,” Legend says. “It’s very attractive to deal with schools that are defying the odds and succeeding, and I wanted to see what I could do to create an environment where more of this can happen.”

Legend now co-chairs the school’s board with News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch who made a surprise donation of $5.5 million to the school last year. While Legend’s and Murdoch’s beliefs might fall on different ends of the political spectrum, their co-chairing shows that educational issues can extend beyond politics and that education shouldn’t be a political matter.

Both Legend and Kenny believe that the way to break the cycle of poverty is through a quality education — and access to it. Kenny’s schools, which educate more than 700 children, focus on teaching and teachers. Kenny thinks teachers are the key to school reform and developing successful students.

“A lot of time when they talk about school reform they talk about teacher quality and solely in terms of whether or not the kids can past the proficiency tests, which is important, but that’s not the only thing that matters,” Legend says.

Kenny, he says, realized that the success or failure of the school depends upon the individuals that are running it — the teachers, the principals: “You have to arouse passion in them and allow them autonomy and the ability to be creative and really do the best for their kids.”

Legend characterized the public high school he attended, and graduated from, in Springfield, Ohio, as a “drop-out factory” since only 230 out of about a class of 500 graduated in 1996.

“A lot of our schools around the country, particularly in working class and poor neighborhoods have really low drop-out rates,” Legend says. “And America continues to fall behind in our high school graduation rates compared to the rest of the developed world,  so it’s an issue we have to figure out.”

Legend puts some of the blame on teachers’ unions and their efforts to make sure all educators are treated the same, regardless of their skill or record of success.

“In trying to create teacher equality to protect our teachers we end up treating them like assembly line workers, factory workers, instead of creative knowledge workers,” Legend says. “In treating them like they’re the same you ignore the worst but you also ignore the best. It doesn’t foster creativity and excellence.”

Instead, Legend wants to spread different ideas about school reform and create a collaborative work environment. While there is a plethora of charter schools to work with that have different ideas about how to improve our education system, Legend says there are a lot of things in common that are working like fostering creativity and individuality in teachers and students that can be spread in a scalable way.

“Even though there  are a lot of individual success we don’t have to treat them as exceptions,” Legend explains. “Teacher quality, data on tracking students’ progress, tutoring, more hours in school, a culture of high expectations — we know these things are working in a number of schools in a numbers of states around the country.”

To accomplish all of these goals, Legend has started advocating for a lift of the cap on charter schools in New York state and advocating to improve regulatory environment so more charter schools can be created all over the country.

“I didn’t want this innovation and success to only be in a few isolated incidents. I want it to be all over the place so I began to advocate for that to happen,” Legend explains.

One way he is advocating that message is by releasing a brand-new album with the Roots called Wake Up! One of the songs on it, “Shine,” is featured in the new film, “Waiting for Superman,” which documents the education crisis in our country. Legend says this project allowed him to unite his passion for music with his passion for activism.

So, what’s next on Legend’s agenda after he wraps-up his album promotion tour?

“I’m going to continue speaking out on behalf of all the kids in our country,” he says.

“There’s a new paradigm that’s an alternative to aid,” Janah says. “Aid is not necessarily the best solution for poor people. We spend a hundred billion a year on stuff that we know very little about — there’s very little transparency in the foreign aid world — and it has a perverse effect on small economies.”

While in Kenya in 2007, Janah realized that there was a disconnect between market access in the U.S. versus in India and Africa, which is close to zero. In rural India, for example, there are 150 million people who don’t have jobs. In part, because they don’t have access to the Internet. Samasource bridges these two realities not only by securing jobs, but also by providing the untapped, underemployed human workforce with an Internet connection so that they have access to jobs.

Click here to view the embedded video.

So far, according to Samasource, they have provided a livelihood for over 900 people in Africa, South Asia, and Haiti. In turn, they say, socially responsible companies use them to contribute to economic development and to fight poverty.

“There are more than 4 billion mobile phones in use globally. There are a billion laptops and netbooks in use and 200 million get sold every year. That means a huge new swatch of humanity can now be tapped for their brainpower, not just their manual power,” Janah says. “So instead of them always receiving information from us, we can now receive information from them.”

With lower entry barriers for certain type of work these days and so much data being collected on these laptops and phones, there’s an enormous role — and thus work opportunities — for humans to categorize and improve the data.

For example, business listings need to be verified. Every month in the U.S. there are about 4,000 new businesses that get started in each state. As of now, there is no centralized way of collecting the data on these new businesses. So Samasource provides their workers with a very simple web platform to gather up to date information on the businesses.

“We are empowering them by allowing them to become breadwinners,” Janah says. “We are rethinking the way we engage the poor.”

For more from Janah, click here.

Over one billion people live in extreme poverty, subsisting on $1.25 a day or less. Among the Millennium Development Goals determined by world leaders in 2000 is a target to achieve “full and productive employment and decent work for all, including women and young people.” Despite up to 90% literacy rates and increasing levels of per capita income being spent on higher education in developing countries, employment opportunities remain scarce, even in urban areas.

Samasource connects 900 marginalized people, from Kenyan youth to women in rural Pakistan, with dignified work opportunities via the Internet. Using the business process outsourcing model, we secure contracts from global organizations to provide digital services such as data entry, book digitization, Internet-based research, business listings verification, audio transcription, and video captioning.

The project is broken down into smaller tasks called “microwork” and then allocated to our Service Partners, for- and non-profit organizations currently in Haiti, India, Kenya, Pakistan, South Africa, and Uganda. The work is completed by women, youth, and refugees using an Internet connection provided by our Service Partners, and sent back to Samasource for quality assurance and delivery to the client.

Samasource derives its name from the Sanskrit word “sama” which means equal. To date, Samasource has generated over $1.5 million in contract work for women, youth and refugee workers in nine countries. The work contracted to Samasource is real work for real companies that connects poor youth, women, and refugee workers to earned income from multinational companies, and will enable them to matriculate to higher paying jobs in the digital work sector. Samasource goes beyond job readiness programs and educational services by facilitating tangible, on-the-job experience that provides steady income and work skills.

So far, Darden has helped raise $36 million for the foundation. In 2009, Darden was named Louisiana’s Young Entrepreneur of the Year by the Small Business Administration. After being in New Orleans for four years now and having worked with the foundation since 2007, Darden explains why his work is so essential and how these types of homes can transform a family’s quality of life:

More from Tom Darden:

Make It Right partnered with award-winning architects who worked pro bono to design homes based around the needs of lower ninth ward residents. Design features such as covered porches and wide front stairs allow residents to maintain social connections to their neighborhood, preserving the “culture of engagement” that characterized the neighborhood prior to Hurricane Katrina.

Other design features such as large windows maximize daylight, and high ceilings facilitate passive heating, cooling, and ventilation. While the aesthetic is contemporary, many of the designs are inspired traditional New Orleans design, and reflect the unique spirit of the community.

In answering that query, Chabris, who investigates the illusions of our mind, also finds out how well we think we pay attention, which, in an era of short attention spans, is critical to know and understand.

In particular, Chabris focuses on the illusions of attention and confidence and everyday illusions.

“Illusions are an aspect of the mind that everybody shares,” he says. “They are also part of the way our minds are built.”

When it comes to the illusion of attention, “we can all retrieve fairly vivid memories of a lot things that happen in our lives,” Chabris says. “It’s just that the vividness is sometimes the illusion that masks inaccuracy and lack of detail.”

Our everyday illusions, more formerly known as mental illusions, are hard to overcome and can also be very dangerous. A prime example of one is thinking we’re able to pay attention to the road while driving and talking on a cell phone.

“The power of this gorilla video is that it can show us instantaneously how much we’re missing and can really reveal a lot about how our minds work,” Chabris says.

The third illusion, the illusion of confidence, shows that people on average think they are above average. This is, surprisingly, what criminals and chess masters have in common: both illustrate the illusion of confidence. As do people on TV who tell you what stocks to buy.

“We think we’re better at all kinds of skills than we actually are,” Chabris says.

Scarily, it’s the least competent that have the most inflated senses of their own abilities. That said, Chabris adds, confidence is, to some extent, a trait. So within an area where you have some knowledge you want to be much better aware of how skilled you actually are and that might help you get better, Chabris says:

Self-knowledge is the most important kind of knowledge and, perhaps, this helps you to be more forgiving of other people’s mistakes.

As for the connection between beauty and brain? It is the reward circuit. It’s the part of the brain that responds to rewarding stimuli. Looking at attractive people activates the same part of the brain as all these other more physiological, hard-wired rewards like chocolate, heat and cold.

Ultimately, we should know that if we don’t need the information, chances are we’re not storing it very reliably. And we should recognize that our intuitive concepts can lead us very astray.

“Watch for the gorilla in your midst is my six-word summary,” ends Chabris, playing off of another the book Six-Word Memoirs, co-authored by Larry Smith, who was another 2010 PopTech conference speaker .

Eco-explorer David de Rothschild, the founder of Adventure Ecology, believes we need to change the way we think about plastic. In addition to using and creating less of it, de Rothschild thinks we need to start recognizing used plastic as a resource.

“Maybe plastic is not to blame,” de Rothschild says. “Maybe we are just not using it correctly.”

David is quick to point out that there are two different kinds of plastic — the good kind and the bad. But even a type of plastic that might be considered good — like say a biodegradable plastic cup — is not good if designed to be used for a one-time purpose.

Straws are the worst, de Rothschild says. “They suck,” he says. Literally, yes, and figuratively because they they are so overused and rarely a real necessity. But instead of fighting this existing reality, David is trying to create a new one.

“Pollution is nothing but the resources we aren’t harvesting,” David says. “We just need to start using it differently and thinking about it differently.”

For David, that meant building a catamaran out of 12,500 plastic bottles to show how something we consider waste can actually be used to, for instance, sail across the Pacific Ocean. The sail on the Plastiki, what David named the boat, from San Francisco to Sydney definitely made for a great story, but for David that is not enough. “We need to take these stories and do something with them,” he says.

For now, David, who hosts the Sundance Channel’s “Eco-Trip,” is redefining the story we tell ourselves about plastic. He hopes that this storytelling will inspire ideas on how to be smarter about our planet and the way we live.

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality,” Buckminster Fuller once said. “To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

It is a favorite quote of David’s, although he substitutes the word “boat” for “model,” and it is exactly what he is in the midst of doing.

His stutter, he says, turned out to be his greatest blessing: “Stutters can do a couple things right. One of them is to speak to animals.” And so Alan has spent his life dedicated to preserving and protecting these big cats who provided him comfort and a sense of belonging as child.

Growing up in New York City the only place to find these big cats was the Bronx Zoo, where Rabinowitz wound up working for 30 years. Although Alan still resides in New York, he left the city jungle to spend some time in the real ones in order to create wildlife preserves and sanctuaries for jaguars, tigers, and various kinds of leopard cats. “I loved being away from people in the jungle,” Alan recalls. In Belize, he created the world’s only Jaguar reserve. In Burma, he created the world’s largest tiger reserve. But this wasn’t enough.

After spending much of his adult life working around the clock to save these animals that arguably saved his childhood, he realized he was failing at what he was trying to accomplish. Ironically, this epiphany occurred while he was being lauded and recognized for his success. “I had set up all these preserves and I was failing to preserve [these cats],” he says. “I knew I had to get them more space.” In order to do so, Alan realized he needed to establish safe corridors for these cats to roam.

Alan has already set up a Jaguar corridor from Mexico to Argentina and he is working on establishing one for tigers in Southeast Asia. Instead of always fighting a crisis and possible extinction of the world’s largest cats, Alan wants to be ahead of it. “Conservation is failing us,” Alan says. “These animals are in danger. It’s not enough to just have reserves for [these cats],” says Alan, who continues his work through Panthera, where he is the CEO. For Alan, the time to act is now.

This grave sense of urgency may come from the fact that he was diagnosed with an incurable leukemia. Although Alan is so focused on fighting for the big cats that he never mentions his own battle. The attack that Alan will talk about is one where he was pounced on by a female jaguar — Alan says that all female species, including humans, are much more dangerous than the males:

Despite the attack and the fact that he says he still likes communicating with animals much more than people, Alan has found a big, passionate, active voice in the human world.

“The little boy who didn’t have a voice found it. Not so long ago actually.”

For that, and giving the most passionate, heartfelt speech, he has been the only speaker so far at PopTech to receive a standing ovation.

The first technology of its kind, FLOW (Field Level Operations Watch) is an Android mobile phone app that captures data on water points and sanitation projects in 11 different countries. The data is automatically uploaded to Google Earth so it is free and available for anyone to see and use.

The two big gamebreakers for FLOW, Breslin says, is that it compiles the data collected and it tracks information — anyone with a phone can upload data to it.

By being able to monitor and troubleshoot water sources and sanitation projects Breslin hopes that FLOW will have a long-term impact on these  communities where clean, drinkable water is much more scarce. The data and analysis from FLOW is meant to help domestic governments, NGOs and UN agencies provide and maintain sustainable sources of water. Right now, Breslin says, there are too many water projects that fall apart all the time.

“I want to know that we are still providing water not just a year from now, but 10 years from now,” Breslin says.

It’s not just water and sanitation to which FLOW can bring lasting change. The technology can also be used by rural health clinics to report on what diseases they are treating, which medicines and supplies are needed, or how many births have occurred. It can even help farmers better assess the agricultural markets — for instance, they could report on how much grain they sold that day.

With FLOW Breslin wants to change the way we think about poverty and philanthropy.

“We sell poverty and then we forget about these communities,” Breslin explains. “I want to push them so that water [and other goods] last forever.”

Instead, both philanthropic investors and organizations have been guilty of focusing on just short-term results.  Breslin is asking both sides to take a harder and longer look at making sure these philanthropic endeavors actually have a meaningful, long-term impact.

“The metrics in the sector are not right:  We are measured by short-term indicators like how many loans we make and how many beneficiaries we help in one year instead of asking how many people we have helped over over, 3, 6, 10 years. I want to know that you are getting a return on your investment. I want to know that my investment led to transformative change.”