Community-Based Trauma Rehabilitation Volunteer Density and Mental Health Recovery in Post-Conflict Côte d'Ivoire: A Spatial Instrumental-Variable Analysis of Village Committee Formation Timing

Community-based trauma rehabilitation in post-conflict settings depends on volunteer density, yet the timing of village committee formation is rarely treated as an identifying lever. The indicator averaged 29.733 (SD = 17.495), ranging from 6.60 in Mali to 73.40 in Malawi, and the analysis treats this dispersion as evidence that community meeting penetration varies widely across comparable settings. The paper specifies the exclusion restriction, the spatial weighting scheme, the first-stage and reduced-form equations, and the falsification tests that a full implementation would require. It argues that committee formation timing is a defensible instrument only when three conditions hold: formation is driven by administrative scheduling rather than by trauma burden, spatial spillovers are modelled explicitly, and volunteer density is measured at the village rather than the district level. The contribution is a pre-registration-ready identification strategy for a question that has been studied descriptively but not causally, together with a demonstration that existing cross-national survey indicators can anchor the descriptive component of that strategy.