Rural borehole-maintenance cost-sharing rules and women's water-collection time in Tanzanian villages: a regression-discontinuity analysis of pump-failure threshold triggers

Rural water supply in Tanzania is organised around boreholes whose maintenance is financed through community cost-sharing rules, yet the institutional design of these rules has not been analysed for its gendered time consequences. The design treats the threshold as an assignment variable: villages whose pump failure is classified just below the trigger remain under the minor-repair rule, while those just above it move to the major-rehabilitation rule, which typically imposes higher household contributions and longer repair delays. The paper specifies the running variable, the cutoff, the bandwidth, the local linear estimator and the manipulation and covariate-balance checks that the design requires. It then connects the estimated discontinuity to a time-use mechanism in which cost-sharing rules alter both the price of water and the queueing and travel burden that falls disproportionately on women. Because no village-level data are analysed here, the contribution is methodological: a credible identification strategy for a policy-relevant question, together with the measurement and inference conditions under which it would yield interpretable estimates. The design is offered as a template for evaluating community water-financing rules across rural East Africa.