Rural village savings-group share-out timing and women's post-harvest distress sales in Ghanaian districts: a regression-discontinuity analysis of payout-cycle thresholds

Village savings and loan associations in rural Ghana typically distribute their accumulated capital in a single annual share-out, timed to coincide with the harvest. The timing of that payout is widely treated as an administrative detail, yet it determines whether a woman holds cash when post-harvest prices are at their seasonal trough or when they have begun to recover. The design is developed as a methodological proposal, not as an executed estimation: no primary data were collected for the present analysis. It also reports the provenance and descriptive statistics of the DHS Program indicator 'Believes fertile period is middle of the cycle' (N = 155 country-survey observations, 38 African countries, 1986-2025; mean 22.505, standard deviation 10.894) as a demonstration of the kind of cross-survey descriptive baseline against which district-level designs must be situated. The contribution is a transferable template for evaluating savings-group payout rules, together with an argument that share-out timing should be treated as a design parameter of the group rather than as an incidental feature of its calendar.