Rural women's cooperative membership renewal thresholds and intra-household food allocation in Rwandan coffee districts: a regression-discontinuity analysis of quota compliance

Rural women's cooperatives in Rwandan coffee districts typically condition membership renewal on a minimum annual delivery quota, creating a sharp threshold at which members either retain cooperative status or lose access to collective marketing, input credit and extension services. The framework specifies the running variable, the compliance rule, the bandwidth and kernel choices, and the household-level food-allocation outcomes that the design can credibly identify. It also formalises the intra-household bargaining channel through which cooperative membership renewal is expected to shift food shares toward women and children, and it states the assumptions under which the threshold estimand is interpretable as a causal effect. Because no primary household data are analysed here, the paper is a methodological and conceptual contribution: it specifies the design, the estimand, the identifying assumptions and the falsification tests that a field implementation would require. The framework is intended to make the quota-compliance mechanism visible to cooperative managers, district agricultural officers and researchers, and to clarify why a threshold that appears administratively trivial may carry substantial welfare consequences for rural households.