Rural cooperative arbitration fee waivers and women's unpaid elder-care reallocation in Rwandan sectors: a difference-in-differences estimation of waiver-eligibility thresholds

Rural cooperatives in Rwanda increasingly route disputes over land, livestock and household obligations through fee-based arbitration, and the waiver schedules that govern access to those forums are set at the sector level. The argument is developed as a methodological and conceptual contribution: a difference-in-differences design is specified in which sectors on either side of a waiver-eligibility cutoff are compared before and after a threshold revision, with unpaid elder-care hours as the outcome and cooperative arbitration participation as the mediating channel. It argues that waiver thresholds are not neutral administrative conveniences but distributive instruments that allocate the cost of accessing justice onto the households least able to absorb it, and that the care consequences of that allocation are systematic and estimable. The contribution is a design that makes the care-arbitration nexus visible to sector-level policy and a set of propositions that specify when threshold revisions should and should not be expected to shift elder-care burdens.