Rural development cooperative seed-loan repayment timing and women's varietal diversification in Tanzania: a difference-in-differences analysis of harvest-schedule thresholds

The study frames repayment schedules as institutional thresholds that interact with harvest calendars, creating liquidity constraints that disproportionately affect women farmers' ability to allocate land across multiple crop varieties. Using a difference-in-differences design around harvest-schedule thresholds, the analysis conceptualises how repayment timing before versus after harvest alters the opportunity cost of varietal diversification. The paper draws on a synthesis of cooperative finance literature, gender and agriculture scholarship, and institutional economics to develop a mechanism-based framework. The central argument is that repayment schedules aligned with harvest periods reduce the liquidity pressure that forces women to prioritise staple crops over diverse varieties, thereby enabling greater varietal diversification. The contribution lies in specifying the threshold mechanism through which cooperative repayment rules affect gendered agricultural outcomes, moving beyond aggregate assessments of credit access to examine the temporal structure of loan obligations. The paper concludes that repayment timing constitutes a policy lever with distributional consequences for women's agricultural decision-making, and that harvest-schedule alignment should be treated as a design principle in cooperative seed-loan programmes.