<mark>study groups. All statistical testing adjusted standard errors for clustering. The groups appear balanced on all of the individual characteristics assessed including age, religion, ethnicity, educational attainment, literacy, employment and marital status. The study treatment groups were also generally well balanced on household level characteristics including household composition, type of household, household ownership, and sanitation type. However, the study groups were not balanced at baseline on the type of water source used at the household.</mark> Appendix Tables A10 and A11 display facility characteristics and health service coverage at baseline. The facility sample appears well balanced at baseline on most characteristics assessed; however, there was a difference between the study groups in the likelihood that the facility had an incinerator. The sample was well balanced for most services assessed, though we found statistical differences at baseline for growth monitoring and for documented childhood vaccination coverage.

COMPARISON OF OPERATIONAL FUNDS AVAILABLE AND SUBSIDY PAYMENTS TO C1 AND T1 AT ENDLINE One important feature of the impact evaluation design was that the subsidies provided to control group 1 (C1) – which were not linked to performance – should be equal to the payment amounts provided to facilities in the full PBF treatment group. At endline, the health facility survey collected data on the amount of funding available at the health facilities for operation expenses, including the amount of revenue collected from cost recovery, funding provided directly by the Ministry of Health, and subsidies from the PBF program. To verify the equal receipt of financing, we compared data on total financing available, and subsidy amount received between T1 and C1 health facilities. The first panel of table 3 displays the average amount of health facility revenue from all of these sources during each trimester of 2014 in T1, the full PBF group, and C1, the increased financing group. The second panel compares the amount of subsidies received in each of the two groups. Neither the subsidy amount, nor the total amount of financing available at the health facility differed statistically between the two groups during any trimester of 2014. We also sought to assess whether per capita payments were equal between groups, as this was the intention of the study. However, exact catchment area population numbers are not known. Therefore, we standardized payments by the number of health workers in each facility as a proxy measure for catchment area population. Using this proxy measure, we found no differences in payment amounts between groups (Table 3).

We also confirmed the subsidy data collected in the facility questionnaire by requesting subsidy data from the regional funds. These data, which represent the payments made by the regional funds to the health facilities in treatment groups T1 (full PBF) and C1 (additional financing), are presented in Appendix Figures A5 – A7. These figures also show that the total payments provided to the health facilities in each treatment group were equal during the entire study period.

While the payment results show that overall the two groups received equivalent financing volumes for the same number of health facilities (approximately 50 each) during the study period, when looking at per capita financing we find that the C1 group in fact received higher levels of per capita financing than the T1 group. This is largely due to the fact that in the South-West region, while the T1 and C1 groups had the same number of facilities (21 for T1 and 20 for C1), the total population covered by these health facilities varied substantially. In the T1 group several health 11