a b s t r a c tAchieving the MDG goal of reducing world poverty by 50% by 2015 requires the cooperative effort of many disciplines. To date the discipline of organizational psychology has not played as significant a role as it might in this endeavor. With the recent establishment of the Global Task Force for Humanitarian Work Psychology, this discipline signaled its commitment to the global effort. Organizational psychology offers to bring its expertise to poverty reduction: its ability to assess needs and capacity, develop partnerships with stakeholders, bring about and manage change, and systematically review, evaluate, monitor and revise high level mandates, policy development, program implementation and consultation on personnel issues. Its successes as practitioners-scientists in private enterprise will enhance its credibility for success in the public sphere. The article reviews the research and practice of some of the organizational psychologists presently engaged in poverty reduction and how humanitarian work psychology might enhance the efforts of anti-poverty organizations.

A Girls Empowerment Programme held in 2010 in Lesotho, Sub-Saharan Africa, focused on HIV/ AIDS risk reduction and prevention, life skills and entrepreneurial training (income-generating activities). Entrepreneurial training was a crucial part of equipping the camp attendees with basic skills to help them develop sustainable livelihoods. Such skills and financial independence are essential to enable rural girls to complete their secondary schooling (in a fee-based educational system) and to pursue a career, as well as to further help them be less susceptible to transactional sex and its significant risks. The results of a brief process evaluation with some nested supporting data showed considerable improvement in the girls' knowledge about income-generating activities. In addition, almost half of the camp attendees participated in further entrepreneurial training and

SummaryDeveloping a globally responsive Science-Practitioner-Humanist model (Lefkowitz, 2008) means articulating professional values (supply) and meeting global demand. The United Nations' Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) seek to halve human poverty by 2015 and how organizations respond to this constitutes a formidable demand on Organizational Psychology. A key process for delivering more effective aid is the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, which seeks collaborative contributions from a plethora of Organizations, including business organizations and professions like ours. We argue that a thoughtful articulation of what Organizational Psychology uniquely stands for, and can offer, is therefore needed. It is proposed that a key mechanism for addressing this challenge is a Task Force, whose functions will include the coordination of institutions within psychology, and linking them to those in development. We describe such a task force and outline its core mission (Reichman, Frese, Schein, Carr, MacLachlan, & Landy, 2008). Organizational Psychology's response to poverty reduction should meet Lefkowitz's criteria for developing a more humanist model of science and practice as the MDGs are inherently humanist and valuesbased.

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Purpose -This paper aims to reflect on the work of Virginia E. Schein and her paper "The functions of work-related group participation for poor women in developing countries: an exploratory look." Design/methodology/approach -Professor Schein traveled to Nicaragua, to lower-income settings, where she observed and recorded the experiences of women working in self-organized groups, and used those observations to argue to the profession generally that self-organized groups of women, however marginal the work itself, can be instrumental in developing the key sense of agency, and self-efficacy. These are basic capabilities; the stuff of the Millennium Development Goals. Findings -For this special issue, therefore, the authors have made Schein's 2003 study a focal point. To set the context they asked Dr Schein to reiterate the rationale for the research, and provide a brief overview of the original observations. To help expand the debate on gender, work and poverty reduction, the authors have asked noted colleagues to provide a series of Commentaries on the original article. Originality/value -Women, especially those raising children alone, are among the poorest of the poor in developing and more developed economies. Research that is applicable and relevant to their work-related concerns can and should be a larger part of worldwide efforts to reduce poverty. Organizational psychology has much to contribute to those long-overdue efforts.