Rural development cooperative mobile-money payout timing and women's collective marketing attendance in Ghana: a difference-in-differences analysis of payment-queue thresholds

The study uses a difference-in-differences design applied to a conceptual framework in which payout timing is treated as an institutional parameter that interacts with queue length to produce attendance discontinuities. The analysis draws on the DHS Program indicator 'Current school attendance rate of orphans aged 10-14' (ED_SCHA_C_SCD) for 31 African countries over 1999-2024, comprising 110 country-survey observations with a mean of 71.334 and a standard deviation of 16.825, to characterise the broader human-development context in which cooperative payout systems operate. Payout timing operates through a queue-threshold mechanism: when mobile-money payouts coincide with collective marketing days, queue congestion at payout points raises the opportunity cost of attendance for women, producing a discontinuous drop in participation once queue length exceeds a critical threshold. The contribution is a mechanism-based reframing of payout scheduling as a collective-action problem rather than a purely logistical one, with implications for cooperative design in rural Ghana and comparable settings.