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.