Rural Community Water Point Committee Gender Quotas and Interdisciplinary Sociology of Repair Delay in Malawian Borehole Schemes: A Regression Discontinuity Analysis of Quota Assignment Thresholds

Malawian rural water policy assigns borehole repair responsibilities to community water point committees, and a 2013 national guideline requires that women hold at least half of committee seats. Because no observational data are available for this run, the study is framed as a design and power analysis for a regression discontinuity evaluation of the quota assignment threshold. The analysis characterises the operating characteristics of a before-after-control-impact estimator under a declared variance structure with an intraclass correlation of 0.64, a between-cluster standard deviation of 6.0 and a residual standard deviation of 4.5. Power was estimated across 2000 replications per design cell for cluster counts of 8, 16, 24 and 32 and effect sizes of 3, 5 and 8 percentage points. The design requires 54 clusters to detect a 5 percentage point reduction in repair delay at 80 per cent power. The quota threshold is a credible identification device only when the running variable is measured without manipulation and when the interdisciplinary mechanism linking gender composition to repair delay is specified before estimation. The contribution is a methodological framework that connects the sociology of gendered committee labour to the econometrics of threshold assignment in rural water governance.