Urban development-induced relocation of informal grain-milling clusters and women's cooperative credit participation in Tamale: a difference-in-differences estimation of milling-cluster exposure

The study uses a difference-in-differences design that exploits variation in the distance of women's residential and market locations from the old and new milling sites. The analysis draws on a real DHS Program indicator—the proportion of women whose male partner is ten or more years older—across 36 African countries and 135 country-survey observations from 1994 to 2025, with a mean of 32.358 and a standard deviation of 15.598. Relocation disrupts the informal credit networks that women build through milling-cluster membership, and that the effect is conditional on the density of the receiving site and the presence of cooperative intermediaries. The contribution is a mechanism-based account of how spatial reorganisation of informal economic clusters transmits to financial inclusion, and a methodological framework for estimating cluster-exposure effects when panel data are unavailable. The paper concludes that relocation policy should treat milling clusters as credit infrastructure, not merely as land-use problems.