districts covered by the CPBF impact evaluation and 221 are recorded to be misplaced in one of the impact evaluation sectors. Of these 221 clusters, 109 are misplaced in treatment sectors and 112 in control sectors.

# Descriptive Statistics

## **i. Sample Characteristics and Balance**

Table 2 presents summary statistics of the baseline sample of women with recent pregnancies by treatment. It reports means of women’s characteristics and care provided during the most recent pregnancy. It also reports the p-value of t-tests assessing the similarity between treatment and control groups. The results confirm that the randomization achieved balance of observed characteristics between the two groups.

About 19 percent of the sample is from the South Province, 25 percent from the North, 28 percent from the West and 28 percent in the East. Households consisted of an average of five members and were located at an average distance of about 4.3 kilometers from the health center serving their village. The average age of the sample of women with recent pregnancy was 28.2 and 91 percent of them were married. Seventeen percent of the women have never attended school, 69 percent attended at least some primary school and the rest have attended at least some secondary or higher level education. Ninety percent were covered by Mutuelle, the community-based health insurance program.

The average number of births given by women in the sample is three and the women had on average 2.7 living children. Forty percent of the women reported ever using any modern method of family planning. Almost all women have received at least one antenatal consultation during their most recent pregnancy but only 63% initiated antenatal care within the first four months of the pregnancy and 37 percent received four or more consultations. Seventy-nine percent have delivered in a health facility, attended by a skilled health provider. Thirty-eight percent have reported receiving postnatal care within the ten days following the birth.

Some health centers endowed women with gifts even prior to the implementation of the intervention evaluated in this analysis. These health centers chose this type of conditional transfer as a strategy to increase coverage of services for which they were rewarded through the PBF scheme at the health facility level. About 5 percent reported receiving gifts for attending antenatal consultations, 4 percent for in-facility delivery and less than 2 percent for postnatal care. The values of these transfers are estimated to be less than a third of the values suggested for the CPBF in-kind transfers for each of the services.

The sampling strategy might have resulted in an unrepresentative sample of women with recent pregnancies. Because the selection of women was done with the aid of village leaders and community health workers, it could be that women in the sample are more likely to use health services relative to the overall population of pregnant women. A comparison of the sample to that of the nationally representative sample of the RDHS 2010, however, reveals that the baseline rates of utilization of maternal health services are similar in both surveys. The comparison was done with the subsample of 6