Village assembly public comment minutes in Tanzanian ward councils impose speaking-time limits that are rarely analysed as gendered institutional thresholds. The analysis draws on the DHS Program indicator 'Travel time to nearest health facility: less than 30 minutes' for 16 African countries surveyed between 2021 and 2025, with a mean of 48.588 per cent and a standard deviation of 16.259, ranging from Malawi at 19.90 to Senegal at 74.70. These values are used descriptively to characterise the rural service environment in which ward council deliberation occurs, not to estimate a treatment effect. Speaking-time limits function as procedural thresholds whose behavioural consequences are asymmetric by gender, and it specifies the identification assumptions, running variable, bandwidth logic and estimand that a future empirical application would require. The contribution is a transferable methodological template linking deliberative procedure to motion-withdrawal behaviour, together with a bounded descriptive account of rural access conditions across the sixteen country surveys.
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Kweka et al. (2026) studied this question.
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