Matilda Kerry

Matilda Kerry is a public health physician. She founded the George Kerry Life Foundation in 2007 and has since set up community-based cervical and breast cancer awareness and screening programs which have screened 8000 women, provided pre-cancer treatment and educated over 100,000 families free or at highly subsidized rates. Her vision is to have equitable health services for all women in Africa.

Education

Matilda Kerry attended the Federal Girls College, located in Benin. She also studied Medicine and Surgery at the University of Lagos.

Career

In 2000, she was crowned Most Beautiful Girl in Nigeria, making her Nigeria's Miss World 2000 representative. In 2001, Matilda crowned the well known Agbani Darego as the Most Beautiful Girl in Nigeria 2001 and Agbani Darego went on to become Miss World 2001 later that year. She worked as a model between the year 2000 and 2006.

After her reign, Kerry graduated from the University of Lagos in 2006, and now practices medicine, specializing in Community medicine. She is president of the George Kerry Life foundation, a foundation that gives awareness about non-communicable diseases (NCD's).

She is part of the Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI), a flagship program of President Barack Obama. In 2016 she was a Mandela Washington fellow, where she joined 1000 other young African leaders in Washington DC for the Presidential summit in 2016 to strategize on moving Africa forward.

She holds a master's degree in public health, is a member of the West African College of Public Health physicians and a Sexuality Leadership Development Fellow.