Delegates to the Sixth Africa Regional Conference on Women yesterday decried attempts to shift poverty out of the United Nations Development Programme stable and into the World Bank as part of the restructuring of the beleaguered UN agency.

Declaring that this was tantamount to turning poacher into gamekeeper, Algressia Akwi of Akina Mama in Uganda said: "The ethos of the World Bank has never been social justice. How can we now ask them to co-ordinate poverty?"

Privately, delegates also expressed disquiet over the fact that the contract of the Director of the UNDP Africa office, Thelma Awori - the most senior ranking African woman in the United Nations - has not been renewed. Kenyan-born Awori will vacate her post as assistant administrator of the UNDP in December. "We are not saying that the UN should keep women just for the sake of doing so, but as far as we are concerned (Awori) was doing a good job" said Sarah Longwe, Chair of FEMNET. "At a time when we know the UN is well behind its targets for getting women into decision making this sends entirely the wrong message." "If you are going to prune, why do so where you need to build? This is a backlash against women," a source close to the United Nations added.

Sweeping changes to the UNDP have been introduced by its new administrator, Mark Mulloch Brown, a former vice president of the World Bank. Faced with a fourty percent budget cut, Mulloch Brown sought to cut costs by closing down regional bureaux and stream lining the focus of the institution. The General Assembly intervened to save the regional bureaux, but Awori's contract was not renewed and her post will be downgraded. Sources close to the UNDP said there had been differences of opinion between her and the new administrator.

The UNDP and World Bank, meanwhile, have struck a tacit division of labour with the UNDP concentrating on governance and the World Bank on poverty alleviation. Sources close to the agency say this is part of the new "neo liberal agenda" that has seen the ascendance of the World Trade Organisation, World Bank and IMF as the "global mandarins". The UNDP, according to the source, aims to become the "premier advisory service on governance" whose stamp of approval will be essential for receipt of funds by governments from the IMF and World Bank. But such services, they say, are hardly the immediate need of African countries afflicted by poverty, for whom the UNDP is one of the few remaining sources of grant funding.