Maria Jose Pastor is a public health professional with over five years of experience working with public and private sector organizations to co-design sustainable solutions with local agents to deliver lasting changes to improve health outcomes.
As a program officer at Results for Development (R4D), Ms. Pastor provides technical and program management support across R4D’s Health, Nutrition and Market Shaping practices. She leads key technical and project management activities, focusing on initiatives such as Frontier Health Markets (FHM) Engage. In this role, she collaborates with local partners to foster understanding, sustainability and capacity building within the market development approach (MDA).
Ms. Pastor is responsible for providing project management and operational support for the Finance Capacity Development Platform (FCDP). She also contributes to the Health Systems Strengthening (HSS) Accelerator, where she provides technical research and analysis to integrate rehabilitation into health systems through qualitative data collection and analysis. Furthermore, Ms. Pastor offers technical expertise for the 2024 Maternal, Newborn, and Child Health (MNCH) Market Outlook project. Her role involves conducting qualitative analysis to aid governments, donors and partners in developing and evaluating market-shaping strategies to improve access to critical MNCH products.
Her areas of expertise encompass qualitative and quantitative research and analysis, MNCH, health financing, nutrition financing, collaborative learning and health systems strengthening.
Prior to joining R4D, Ms. Pastor was a program associate at International Business & Technical Consultants, Inc. (IBTCI) where she supported two projects. The first centered on post-EVD Ebola recovery response activities with a goal of supporting countries building back economic and social systems after the outbreak. The second identified priority behaviors and solution pathways for the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) and its partner countries to design new interventions related to energy, education, WASH and education. Before joining IBTCI, Ms. Pastor worked on her master’s thesis on commercial complementary foods among food insecure countries in Latin America.
Ms. Pastor holds a master’s degree in global health from ISGlobal-University of Barcelona and a BS in Kinesiology with a concentration in Public Health and a minor in Anthropology from The College of William and Mary. She is a native speaker of English and Spanish and speaks conversational French and Italian.
