Caroline Moser

Moser distinguished between practical gender needs — running water, a nursery, street lighting — and strategic needs, those that change women's position: land ownership, independent income, a say in decisions. Meeting only the first kind relieves without transforming.

Her tracking of families in Guayaquil over more than thirty years is one of the most valuable longitudinal studies of urban poverty in existence: it shows how a household's assets accumulate across generations, and which public policies destroy them.

A British social anthropologist specialising in urban social policy, Moser worked at the World Bank and the Overseas Development Institute and directed the Global Urban Research Centre at the University of Manchester. Gender Planning and Development (1993) fixed two tools that gender-aware planning has used ever since: the distinction between women's practical and strategic needs and the triple role, productive, reproductive and community, which explains why poor women absorb crises with more hours of work.

Her other contribution is methodological. From 1978 she followed the same families of the Indio Guayas settlement in Guayaquil for more than three decades, an exceptional longitudinal study collected in Ordinary Families, Extraordinary Lives (2009), and from that work came the asset vulnerability framework (1998), which measures poverty by what households can mobilise, housing, labour, human capital and relationships, and not only by their income. Risk reduction policy and slum upgrading programmes adopted it around the world.

Another part of her work studies urban violence from within the neighbourhoods themselves. With Cathy McIlwaine she used participatory methods in Colombia and Guatemala, maps drawn by residents, problem listings and cause diagrams, to understand how violence destroys the social capital of poor communities, and published the results in Encounters with Violence in Latin America (2004). The practical conclusion is that insecurity is tackled by strengthening neighbourhood networks and organisations, not only by policing.