She enrolled in Medicine at the University of Luanda in 1974, the year of the Carnation Revolution. Angola achieved independence from Portugal the following year through the Alvor Agreement; in 1975, she departed for Portugal and concluded her studies in the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lisbon in 1980. She specialised in public health in 1988, having conducted her postgraduate training in the Hospital de Santa Maria in Lisbon and, for eight months, in a community primary healthcare unit in Ponte de Sor, a rural municipality in Alentejo.