Sílvia Lutucuta


Sílvia Paula Valentim Lutucuta is an Angolan politician and cardiologist, the Minister of Health from 2017.
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Life

Lutucuta was born in Huambo in 1967. She trained in medicine and specialised in cardiology at the Hospital de Santa Maria in Lisbon, Portugal. In 2000 she moved to Houston in Texas where she undertook post-doctoral research at Baylor College of Medicine.
She joined the Angolan Society of Cardiovascular Diseases.
Lutacuta is a member of the Member of the MPLA Political Bureau. In 2017 she was nominated to be the Minister of Health in Angola. She has created thousands of new jobs, especially in rural layers. Under her leadership vaccines for COVID-19 were rolled out in her country and she organised the funding.
In 2025 she was able to announce that over 900,000 people in Angola were going to be vaccinated against cholera using the oral vaccine Eurovisol. The ministry had about 1,000 teams backed up by volunteers. The epicentre of the outbreak was in Cacuaco and that was where the campaign was announced. People would be vaccinated in Luanda, Bengo and Icolo provinces. The speed of the response was welcomed by the UN Resident Coordinator in Angola, Dr Zahira Virani and Luís Nunes, Governor of the Province of Luanda. By July, a million people had been vaccinated in Cabinda, Kwanza Sul, Huíla, Lunda Norte, Namibe and Zaire with only babies under one year excluded. Lutacuta backed plans to get two million people vaccinated.