Rural development cooperative grain-bank storage rules and women's post-harvest sales timing in Burkina Faso: a regression-discontinuity analysis of storage-eligibility thresholds

Cooperative grain banks in Burkina Faso commonly ration storage access through a rule that ties eligibility to a member's recorded harvest contribution, producing a sharp threshold below which women may not deposit grain and above which they may. Because no field data have yet been collected, the paper is a methodological proposal rather than an empirical report: it does not estimate a treatment effect, and it does not claim to have done so. To anchor the design in observable magnitudes, the paper draws on the DHS Program indicator 'Women who have a bank account' (id CO_MOBB_W_BNK) for 26 African countries over 2015-2025, comprising 36 country-survey observations with a mean of 15.914 and a standard deviation of 12.211, and it uses that indicator only to characterise the financial-inclusion context in which grain-bank rules operate. The contribution is a pre-specified, falsifiable design that names the estimand, the compliance structure, the manipulation tests and the interpretation that would follow from each possible result, so that the study can be fielded and judged against criteria fixed in advance.