Magda Robalo MD

Dr Magda Robalo is an accomplished global health leader, trailblazer, and a leading voice for gender equality
and social justice. She embodies a rich blend of technical, political, and diplomatic skills and experience,
forged over thirty years of work across geographies and cultures, with diverse global, regional and local
partners, governments, and communities.
She is the co-founder and president of the Institute for Global Health and Development (www.ighd-gb.org),
a private, non-profit foundation, aimed at advancing women’s leadership in global health and promoting their
empowerment by addressing gender inequality and stimulating financial inclusion and integration into the
digital, formal economy.
Dr Magda Robalo is also the chair of the Ethics and Governance Committee of the Global Fund to fight AIDS,
Tuberculosis and Malaria. She is a member of the WHO Global Expert Panel on Health Emergency and
Disaster Risk Management and a mentor of the Kofi Annan Global Health Program of the Africa Centres for
Disease Control and Prevention.
She led transformative reforms of the health sector as Minister of Public Health and provided strategic
leadership to and effective coordination of the national response to the COVID-19 pandemic as the High
Commissioner for COVID-19 in Guinea-Bissau. She was the director for Communicable Diseases, World
Health Organization (WHO) Representative in Namibia and Ghana, Malaria Regional Advisor, and held other
senior leadership positions throughout her successful, two-decade long, international career with the WHO.
As WHO Representative to Ghana, she played an important role in leading the technical, political, and
diplomatic fronts across the UN and beyond on the fight against the Ebola epidemic in West Africa.
She is a fierce advocate for equitable and affordable access to quality health care, has a tested and sound, track
record for building strategic alliances and collaborative partnerships to design and implement transformative,
action-oriented policies to improve health care. She led and oversaw the transition from chloroquine to more
effective malaria treatment policies in Africa and provided intellectual leadership for improved access to HIV
prevention, treatment, and care in West and Central Africa. She has also set up the inaugural hepatitis
prevention and control program in the African region, pioneered the establishment of a novel regional program
to fight NTDs and contributed to design disaster risk reduction and building back better, cross country
approaches in flooded, drought and hunger affected areas and countries of Southern Africa, among others.
Dr Robalo is a medical doctor with a Postgraduate Diploma in Public Health and Tropical Medicine and a
Master of sciences degree in Epidemiology. She fluently speaks and writes Portuguese, French and English