Community-Based Trauma Rehabilitation Attendance and Mental Health Relapse Among Mozambican Civil War Survivors: A Regression Discontinuity Analysis of Disability Grant Eligibility Thresholds

Mozambican civil war survivors with trauma-related mental disorders face a fragmented rehabilitation system in which disability grant eligibility is determined by a functional-impairment score threshold, while community-based rehabilitation attendance is voluntary and uneven. The identification strategy exploits the discontinuous jump in grant receipt at the eligibility threshold, using the running variable of functional-impairment score and a local linear estimator with robust bias-corrected inference. The design is framed as a proposed analysis rather than an executed one: no primary data were collected for the present analysis. The paper specifies the estimand, the assumptions required for identification, the threats to validity specific to post-conflict Mozambican settings, and the policy interpretation that would follow from alternative estimates. The contribution is methodological and substantive: it clarifies how a threshold-based disability grant can be used as a quasi-experimental instrument for rehabilitation attendance, and it identifies the conditions under which grant eligibility would and would not be expected to reduce relapse. The design is intended to inform the evaluation of similar threshold-based social-protection instruments in low-resource post-conflict settings.