Rural village savings-and-loan association meeting-frequency mandates and women's petty-trade capitalisation in Malawian districts: an instrumental-variable analysis of distance-to-bank exposure

Village savings-and-loan associations in Malawi typically require members to meet weekly, and practitioners have debated whether this cadence builds the working capital that women petty traders need or merely extracts time they cannot spare. It specifies an instrumental-variable design in which distance to the nearest commercial bank serves as an instrument for meeting-frequency mandate intensity, on the argument that bank proximity shapes the supply of formal savings substitutes and therefore the stringency of association rules without directly determining a trader's capital stock. It then situates the design against the descriptive record of women's account ownership in sub-Saharan Africa, drawing on the DHS Program indicator 'Women who have a bank account' (CO_MOBB_W_BNK) for 26 African countries between 2015 and 2025, comprising 36 country-survey observations with a mean of 15.914 and a standard deviation of 12.211. The contribution is a pre-registration-ready identification strategy and a set of falsification tests that a future field study in Malawian districts could execute, together with an explicit statement of the conditions under which the design would fail.