Rural development cooperative crop-lien registry digitisation and sharecroppers' tenancy disputes in Ghana: a difference-in-differences design of registry-coverage rollout

Digitising crop-lien registries in Ghanaian rural development cooperatives is expected to reduce sharecroppers' tenancy disputes by making lien claims legible and verifiable, but the evaluation designs available to test that expectation are constrained by the small number of cooperative districts that can be enrolled. the present analysis characterises the operating characteristics of a difference-in-differences design for a registry-coverage rollout under a declared variance structure, using a replication-based power analysis rather than observational data. The design assumes a between-cluster standard deviation of 6.0, a residual standard deviation of 4.5 and an intraclass correlation of 0.640, and evaluates cluster counts of 8, 16, 24 and 32 against effects of 3, 5 and 8 percentage points across 2000 replications per cell.54 clusters are required to detect a 5-percentage-point reduction in dispute incidence at 80 per cent power, that the minimum detectable effect falls steeply as clusters are added, and that the interaction estimate is approximately unbiased but imprecise at the cluster counts most rollout evaluations can afford. The contribution is a design diagnostic: it specifies the cluster counts at which a Ghanaian registry-coverage evaluation can and cannot distinguish a policy-relevant dispute reduction from sampling noise, and it identifies the variance components that must be estimated before any such rollout is powered.