Can a leopard change its spots? According to its delegation at the Sixth African Regional Conference on Women, the World Bank is already a changed animal. Bank representatives, Mark Blackden and Shimwaayi Mamtemba, are the new gender-friendly faces of an institution which has played such a controversial role in Africa's past and in its present.

Today the two will present a seminal World Bank report - Gender, growth and poverty reduction - that draws the links between economic growth and gender inequality. The report traces the links between poverty and gender inequality. It has found, for example, that growth in Africa would have doubled between 1960 and 1992 without gender disparities in spending in formal sector employment and in schooling.

The report, first published in March, is the culmination of a six-year conversion in the World Bank in which it has sought to introduce a gender dimension into its work. Its Damascene Conversion is owed in no small measure to the lobbying pressure put on the Bank by women's groups and by pro-poor groupings. Their work forced introspection on the bank. It created a poverty group when the World Bank introduced its special programme of assistance for Africa in the early Nineties. This group did satellite studies on the feminine face of poverty. "It sought to bring to the attention of the Bank the connection between gender and economics," says Blackden.

The connection is widely acknowledged by macro-economists. The remaining challenge is for the Bank to puts its money where its mouth is. It will take time for findings, like those in the report, to be expressed in lending policy. It depends on the message filtering through to country representatives who make lending recommendations. Blackden and Mamtemba also say it is vital for Finance Ministers to be at meetings like the Sixth Regional Conference because they control the national purse strings.

On a sceptical continent, there are many questions about the World Bank's gender credentials. NGOs complain that the World Bank sidelines them. It deals only with governments even though gender NGOs are widely regarded as crucial to the fight against inequality in Africa. And they also complain that the Bank will not impose gender conditionalities although it does so for macro-economic compliance. Blackden counters that "Ninety percent of the debate is about not imposing conditionalities."