of types of vaccines available at the facility. Note that already 89% of facilities in Column 1 have vaccines available. Column 2 shows the results when the variable for having a fridge (working or not) is included. Here, the relation of electricity and the availability of vaccines is captured through the use of a refrigerator for storage with an associated increase of 5.46 percentage points in the percentage of vaccines available. Moreover, when only a working fridge is included in the specification, the association is higher, stating that a functioning refrigerator is associated with the full availability of vaccines.

On the supply side, the availability of the vaccines _in situ_ is key for achieving higher immunization levels. Ensuring a reliable connection to electricity, and the necessary equipment for storage in all facilities might then increase the coverage of vaccination plans. Here, it is relevant to highlight that vaccine coverage might also depend on factors like financial autonomy of vaccine programs and supply chain capacity, but our results indicate infrastructure _in situ_ is also associated with the availability of vaccines at facility level. Finally, it is relevant to mention that in reducing infant mortality related to preventable diseases, motivating the demand side is also relevant, especially after the COVID-19 crisis has interrupted the vaccination schemes of many children around the world.

# 4.3. Availability of Medicines

Medicines are essential components of patient care, and their availability is commonly cited as one of the most crucial elements of quality by health care consumers (Ministery of Health, 2013). Therefore, medicines are critical for the health service provision and pivotal to attend to the population's health care needs (WHO, 2010). Here we analyze two sets of medicines: (i) the list of 19 tracer medicines for children and pregnant women identified by the WHO, and (ii) the list of 10 medicines fundamental for health care systems also identified by the WHO. Results for both lists of medicines are consistent, so here we focus on (i) and present the results for (ii) in Table A5 in the Appendix.

Table 4 shows the results for the list of medicines for children and pregnant women. A stable connection to electricity is related to an increase of 4.5 percentage points in availability of medicines. Furthermore, ICT use for supply management is also positively related to the availability of medicines with a magnitude of 6.79 percentage points. Our transport variable, the distance of the facility to a primary or secondary road in at least fair condition seems not to be correlated with the medicines stock. While a significant difference arises between the first two quintiles of the variable, there is no significant difference in the availability of the selected essential medicines from the closest and further facilities. On the other hand, access to cellphone internet is negatively associated with the percentage of essential drugs in the facilities. While the latter result is surprising, we interpret the cellphone internet access as a proxy for the degree of rural/urban, suggesting the most remote facilities have more medicine availability.

This group of essential medicines need to be available at all facilities to meet the basic health care needs of the population, and there is room for improvement. Only 15% of our sample of facilities use ICT for supply management and, even when almost 90% of the facilities have access to electricity, only half of them have a stable connection. Therefore, as stable electricity and ICT for supply management are positively related to the availability of essential drugs, these two might be leveraged to effectively manage the stock of medical supplies and increase its availability for patients.

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