Rural development cooperative borehole-maintenance fee schedules and women's dry-season vegetable plots in Zimbabwe: a difference-in-differences analysis of pump-repair cost thresholds

Rural development cooperatives in Zimbabwe set borehole-maintenance fee schedules that determine how quickly a pump is repaired after breakdown. The analysis uses the DHS Program indicator 'Households using a tubewell/borehole' for 33 African countries over 1991-2025, comprising 145 country-survey observations with a mean of 17.254 and a standard deviation of 15.443. A difference-in-differences design is proposed around pump-repair cost thresholds, treating the threshold as the treatment-defining parameter and comparing women's plot activity above and below it. The paper specifies the identification assumptions, the threshold-selection rule, the parallel-trends condition and the robustness checks that the design requires. It argues that the fee schedule is not a neutral administrative instrument but a gendered allocation mechanism: a threshold set too high converts a repairable pump into a de facto closure, and the burden of that closure falls disproportionately on women whose dry-season plots depend on borehole water. The contribution is a threshold-based framework for evaluating cooperative maintenance finance as a determinant of women's agricultural livelihoods, together with a transparent statement of what the available data can and cannot identify.