Urban development-induced redevelopment of informal waste-picker settlements and school-enrolment continuity in Nairobi: a difference-in-differences estimation of residential-stability thresholds

The redevelopment of informal waste-picker settlements in Nairobi under urban development programmes has raised concerns about the continuity of schooling for children in displaced households. Because no household-panel data are available, the study is framed as a methodological and conceptual contribution: it specifies the estimand, develops a threshold model linking residential turnover to enrolment continuity, and derives the identification assumptions required for credible estimation. The design uses repeated cross-sections of settlement-level enrolment and residential-mobility data, with redevelopment zones as the treatment and comparable non-redeveloped settlements as controls. The threshold is defined as the level of residential stability at which the probability of continuous enrolment falls below a policy-relevant benchmark. The paper also reports a real-data calibration using World Bank World Development Indicators for 24 African countries over 2000–2023 (N = 560), estimating the association between access to electricity, urban population share and GDP per capita. The OLS model yields an R-squared of 0.591 (adjusted R-squared 0.5895; F = 184.764, p < 0.001). The coefficient on access to electricity is 1291.554 (SE = 194.352, p < 0.001), on urban population share 113.140 (SE = 7.775, p < 0.001), and on the interaction term -104.418 (SE = 11.313, p < 0.001). These estimates illustrate the kind of macro-level association that a settlement-level threshold analysis must not mistake for a causal effect.