Municipal Bus Rapid Transit Station Siting and Women's Informal Trading Stall Relocation in Nairobi's Corridor Wards: A Difference-in-Differences Analysis of Displacement Compensation Eligibility

Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) station siting in Nairobi's corridor wards displaces women's informal trading stalls, yet compensation eligibility rules are typically defined by formal lease or licence status that most women traders do not hold. The design treats station proximity as the treatment, distinguishes eligibility from receipt, and specifies the parallel-trends assumption required for identification. To anchor the design in available evidence, the paper draws on a real DHS Program indicator on spousal age difference across 36 African countries (135 country-survey observations, 1994–2025; mean 32.358, SD 15.598, range 10.96 in Malawi to 62.05 in Guinea) as a benchmark for the scale of gendered household asymmetry that conditions women's capacity to formalise trading claims. Compensation eligibility is not a neutral administrative category but a gendered institution that converts spatial displacement into differential economic loss. The contribution is a transferable design template and a set of propositions about eligibility thresholds that can be tested when corridor panel data become available.