Rural development cooperative meeting-schedule shifts and women's committee attendance in Tanzania: a difference-in-differences analysis of seasonal calendar thresholds

Rural development cooperatives in Tanzania schedule committee meetings around agricultural calendars, yet the effect of shifting meeting times across seasonal thresholds on women's attendance remains unquantified. The design treats cooperative meeting-schedule shifts as a treatment and compares women's committee attendance before and after the shift, with the seasonal calendar threshold as the running variable. Meeting-schedule shifts that cross the planting or harvest threshold reduce women's attendance because they collide with peak agricultural labour demands, and that this effect is larger in cooperatives where women hold a higher share of committee seats. The contribution is a replicable identification strategy for evaluating institutional timing interventions in rural development cooperatives, together with a set of testable propositions about the interaction between meeting timing and gendered time poverty. The paper does not report empirical estimates; it specifies the data requirements, the estimation equation, and the robustness checks needed to identify the effect. The design is intended for use by cooperative managers, development practitioners, and researchers evaluating institutional reforms in rural Tanzania.