Rural Interdisciplinary Sociology of Villages Saving Group Loan Committee Gender Quotas and Women's Borrowing Discouragement in Rwandan Umurenge Associations: A Regression Discontinuity Analysis of Quota Thresholds

Gender quotas for loan committees in village savings groups are intended to increase women's access to credit, yet the threshold at which a quota becomes binding may itself discourage the women it is meant to include. The framework integrates insights from organisational sociology on tokenism, from development studies on group-based microfinance, and from the literature on gender quotas in political institutions. It specifies the mechanism through which a binding quota alters committee composition, the sanctions that women face when they borrow under quota conditions, and the conditions under which discouragement dominates. The paper also reports descriptive statistics from the DHS Program indicator on the gender parity index for net primary school attendance across 33 African countries (N = 102 country-survey observations, mean = 0.987, SD = 0.067), which establishes the broader educational context in which Rwandan women's credit access operates. The contribution is a testable theoretical model and a methodological protocol, not an empirical estimate. Quota thresholds may produce a discouragement effect that is invisible to aggregate borrowing statistics, and that regression discontinuity is the appropriate design for identifying it.