Rural community water-point borehole fee arrears and women's time reallocation to irrigated plots in Tanzanian villages: a regression-discontinuity analysis of arrears-notice thresholds

Community water-point borehole fee arrears are typically governed by administrative notice thresholds that trigger service restriction, yet the consequences of these thresholds for women's labour allocation remain unexamined. The design is framed as a proposed methodology rather than an executed empirical analysis: no primary data were collected, and the paper specifies the identification assumptions, the running variable, the bandwidth selection procedure, the estimand and the threats to validity that a field implementation would need to address. To ground the design in measurable context, the paper draws on the DHS Program indicator 'Households using a tubewell/borehole' across 33 African countries between 1991 and 2025, comprising 145 country-survey observations with a mean of 17.254 per cent and a standard deviation of 15.443. The contribution is a transferable identification strategy for studying how administrative fee thresholds in rural water governance reshape women's time use, together with an explicit statement of the conditions under which the strategy would and would not recover a credible causal effect.