Do Integrated Public Services for Women Boost Utilization? Effects of Ciudad Mujer in El Salvador

Governments spend large sums delivering public services such as healthcare, policing and employment services, yet little is known about effective ways to deliver these services to women. We study Ciudad Mujer, an innovative... [ view full abstract ]

Governments spend large sums delivering public services such as healthcare, policing and employment services, yet little is known about effective ways to deliver these services to women. We study Ciudad Mujer, an innovative model of integrated service delivery for women in El Salvador. Ciudad Mujer integrates existing social services in a single secure environment for women, improving the coordination and quality of service delivery. The Ciudad Mujer service provision model could boost demand by reducing the cost of access, increasing benefits, and exploiting complementarities in service provision. We study the effects of Ciudad Mujer on the demand for services using a placebo-control randomized promotion experiment whereby women near new Ciudad Mujer campuses were randomly encouraged to visit the either Ciudad Mujer or the local public health clinic(placebo), or received no encouragement (control group). Approximately one year later, women exposed to Ciudad Mujer through the encouragement had visited the center an additional 2.1 times, increased the use of all public services by 0.41sd, and reported an improvement of 10% in subjective life-satisfaction.