Our mission
Our work
Friends of Matimba supports Matimba and other organizations working directly with communities in Mozambique to ensure access to healthcare that is dignified and high quality.
Since 2013, this work has placed health advocates in health facilities and communities to remove barriers to care, using grassroots insight to strengthen health systems and improve policy and provider training nationwide.
Board of Directors
Our Board of Directors reviews and directs how contributions are used, including through grants to Matimba in Mozambique.
Jessica is a physician with deep experience turning health strategies into programs that work for underserved communities. She spent eight years on the leadership team at CDC Mozambique, where she helped drive a nationwide expansion of HIV prevention and treatment and a steep reduction in mother-to-child transmission of HIV, while managing complex government, donor and community partnerships. She has led community and facility based health improvement partnerships in Haiti, Nicaragua, the Navajo Nation, South Africa and Uganda. Her expertise spans HIV/AIDS care and treatment, maternal and child health, primary care, rural health care and quality improvement. Jessica holds an MD from Harvard Medical School and an MPH from Johns Hopkins University, where she was a Sommer Scholar.
Keith is a physician with over fifteen years of experience in global health, ten of those years at the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, working simultaneously with the NGO Partners In Health. His work included developing a multidrug-resistant tuberculosis program in Peru — one of the first programs to demonstrate that the disease could be treated in a poor country — as well as comprehensive health improvement projects in rural districts of Haiti, Lesotho, and Malawi, involving the construction of hospitals and health infrastructure and the introduction of programs for HIV, TB, and cancer treatment, surgery, maternal and child health, and behavioral health. He also consulted for the World Health Organization on multidrug-resistant tuberculosis in Latin America and Africa and taught internationally on HIV and TB. Keith returned from international work in 2012 and spent ten years in immigrant and homeless healthcare in New York City. He currently leads practices at rural healthcare clinics in upstate New York and rural Connecticut and remains active on the board of Partners In Health.
Rebecca is a primary care physician and the Executive Director of The Beckon Foundation, a philanthropic organization dedicated to improving health equity. Rebecca's work has focused on optimizing global vaccine supply chains, integrating HIV and sexual and reproductive health for young women, and supporting innovative models of care delivery for last-mile communities in the global South. She endeavors to be a risk-tolerant funder of health systems and to change the paradigms for health financing to support a rights-based approach to health. Through an experiential and experimental model, Rebecca's current investments span geographies, partners, leadership structures, size and scale as an intentional strategy to better understand what works and why. She leverages her medical background whenever possible to bring context and credibility to her work and to serve as a bridge between patients, healthcare providers, and the systems that finance health.
Nadja is a Mozambican human rights lawyer and the Co-Director and Co-Founder of Matimba. Her commitment to justice has been a part of who she is for as long as she can remember. She brings over two decades of experience spanning civil society, community organizing, and teaching. Nadja earned her law degree in 2003 from Universidade Eduardo Mondlane in Maputo, where she is a professor and led the Legal Aid Clinic. She also holds a postgraduate degree in human rights and a master's degree in legal and political sciences from Universidade de Lisboa and Universidade Eduardo Mondlane. Prior to launching Matimba (previously known as Namati Moçambique), she worked for the League of Human Rights, where she focused on advancing health, land and environmental rights, and gender equity. Nadja is a regular participant on national radio and television programs, and was one of three Mozambicans chosen to travel to the White House to participate in President Obama's Forum with Young African Leaders.
Ellie is Co-Director and Co-Founder of Matimba in Mozambique and leads Friends of Matimba's fundraising and communications. She has lived and worked in sub-Saharan Africa for 25 years, advancing health equity and social justice. Before moving to Mozambique in 2009, she served as Director of the Program on Social and Economic Rights for Partners in Health in Neno, Malawi. Her experience spans both grassroots implementation and large-scale program leadership, including launching the Clinton Foundation's pediatric HIV/AIDS program in Malawi and working in Nkwanta, Ghana with the Population Council and Ghana Health Service on scaling up the national Community-Based Health Planning and Services (CHPS) initiative to increase access to health care for the rural poor. Ellie holds an MSc in maternal and child health from the Harvard School of Public Health and a BA from Northwestern University.
Donate
Please make your check payable to Friends of Matimba, Inc. and mail it to:
Friends of Matimba c/o Jessica Cowan 1812 Rampart Street Cortez, CO 81321Please email us with the name of the individual or organization making the gift and the intended donation amount, so we can confirm your check once it's received and send a thank-you.
Friends of Matimba, Inc. is an incorporated US nonprofit with a federal tax ID (EIN: 42-3815571). Our Board of Directors reviews and directs how contributions are used, including through grants to Matimba in Mozambique. We've applied to the IRS for formal recognition as a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization. Once received, our status will apply retroactively to our date of formation, so gifts made today will still qualify for a deduction, and we'll follow up with your official tax receipt at that time.
