Lucy Matthew lived in northern Zambia in the 1990s, working in a rural hospital at the height of the HIV/AIDS pandemic.  She returned to the UK in 1999, and while trying and failing to get a job focused on AIDS, volunteered for Jubilee 2000.  While in Lusaka she had met Zambian Jubilee campaigners, who were passionate about debt cancellation as an issue of both justice and economic necessity.  They described a deadly combination of the unchecked spread of HIV, the number of working-aged people dying from AIDS, and the government’s burgeoning debt repayments, which were greater than health and education spending combined. They also were adamant that if G8 countries and multilateral funders could be persuaded to write off or reduce their debt, there should be an agreed process to give local citizens transparency into how the freed-up money was being spent.  

Since co-founding DATA and ONE, she has continued behind-the-scenes advocacy on global health.