Refugee Resettlement Lotteries and Trauma-Related Mental Health Service Uptake in Ugandan Settlements: A Regression Discontinuity Analysis of Allocation Cutoffs

Refugee resettlement lotteries allocate scarce durable solutions through administrative cutoffs, yet their consequences for trauma-related mental health service uptake remain unexamined. The framework specifies the running variable, cutoff, bandwidth selection, and local polynomial estimation strategy required to recover a local average treatment effect at the threshold. Drawing on the DHS Program indicator 'Current users most recent supply or information from a government health center' (FP_SRCM_W_GHC), which provides 150 country-survey observations across 36 African countries from 1990 to 2025 (mean 25.261, SD 18.895, range 1.50 in Morocco to 51.89 in Zambia), the paper calibrates the expected precision of the proposed design and identifies the conditions under which cutoff-based identification is credible. The contribution is methodological: a pre-specified estimation protocol for a question that has not been causally addressed, together with an assessment of the statistical power available to such a design. The framework implies that resettlement lotteries may generate measurable discontinuities in service uptake at allocation thresholds, but that detecting them requires settlement-level data not currently available.