Village savings and loan associations have expanded rapidly across rural Ghana, and community mental health services increasingly encounter clients whose distress is entangled with group-loan default. The indicator was drawn from 15 African country surveys conducted between 2021 and 2025, with a mean of 29.733 and a standard deviation of 17.495; values ranged from 6.60 in Mali to 73.40 in Malawi. The framework specifies treatment as default exposure within a savings group, control as non-defaulting membership, and identifies the estimand under a parallel-trends assumption that is made explicit and testable. The analysis is methodological and conceptual; no primary data were collected, and the reported statistics describe the DHS indicator rather than an estimated treatment effect.
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Mbuyi et al. (2026) studied this question.
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