Feliciano Reyna, Founder of Accion Solidaria, talks with Design For Change host Sheela Sethuraman about his multi-pronged approach to tackling AIDS in Venezuela. He shares his successes in influencing his government's policies and his strategies for engaging the corporate sector in this effort.

People in the developing world expend more than a quarter of their potential earnings on energy. Economic development, environmental health and global stability all hinge on wise management of global energy resources. David Goldwyn and David Dollar paint a positive picture on what developing countries and governments in the west can do to improve energy use abroad and at home.

AIDS, malaria, and maternal mortality are some of the chronic public health issues that plague Africa. Invited to Stanford, Paul Farmer talks about how his Boston-based organization, Partners In Health, is spending donor dollars to bring the lessons garnered from its work in Haiti to scale up health care services in war-torn Rwanda. His organization seeks to fill the gap that exists between medical R&D and health care delivery so preventions and cures can be brought to more of the people who need them.

Ten years ago, "entrepreneur" didn't exist in the lexicon of many parts of the world. Now, thanks to the work of a nonprofit called Endeavor, entrepreneurs are emerging in countries where such activity was once impossible. In this talk, sponsored by the Stanford Center for Social Innovation, co-founder and CEO Linda Rottenberg shares how her organization has gone from a "crazy" idea of two business school graduates to an important engine for empowering entrepreneurs in Latin America and beyond.

As global leadership evolves from siloed hierarchies to multilateral approaches, networked governance has important potential and faces significant challenges. Panelists, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Ashraf Ghani, Ambassador John Bruton, Ambassador Harriet Babbitt, and Sir Ian Forbes, address the factors, from the practical to the philosophical, at play.

Reconstruction of the electric grid in Iraq is seen as the most important project in that country. Over $60 billion have been pledged, but even three years after the end of the war, there is still a long ways to go. IEEE Spectrum executive editor Glenn Zorpette discusses the progress and challenges, both technological and political, facing the reconstruction effort there.

According to Yale University Professor Charles Perrow, it is time to start learning from recent natural disasters in the United States like Hurricane Katrina. On this edition of IEEE Spectrum Radio, Perrow asserts that instead of simply responding to natural disasters, we should be reducing our vulnerability to them.

AIDS in South Africa has left millions of children without parents or any resources to help themselves. In this episode of Design For Change, host Sheela Sethuraman gets Kim Feinberg to describe how her organization, the Tomorrow Trust, uses education to help these children grow into self sufficient, economically productive, and socially included adults.

One of the biggest problems that low-income people around the world face is the lack of access to capital that might otherwise help them rise out of poverty. Actress Natalie Portman turns the spotlight on her work to promote FINCA's International Village Banking Campaign, aiming to bring financial services to one million of the world's lowest-income families through 100,000 Village Banks by 2010. This talk is sponsored by Stanford's Public Management Program and the Center for International Development.

One of the best methods proven to alleviate poverty is microlending to women, who have a great track record for using loans wisely to create small business enterprises that sustain their entire families. Lynne Patterson talks at the Center for Social Innovation at Stanford about the creation of Pro Mujer, an international microfinance and women's development network in Latin America. She details the mission, objectives, methods, and progress, illuminating the organization's empowering impact on the lives of its many clients.