I am working on a program which states that:

You are given a 2-D matrix with M rows and N columns.You are initially positioned at (0,0) which is the top-left cell in the array. You are allowed to move either right or downwards. The array is filled with 1’s and 0’s. A 1 indicates that you can move through that cell, a 0 indicates that you cannot move through that cell. Return the number of paths from top-left cell to bottom-right cell.(i.e. (0,0)to(M-1,N-1)). Since answer can be large thus you have to return ans%(10^9+7).

static int count(int a[][], int i, int j) {
    int rows = a.length;
    int cols = a[0].length;
    if(a[i][j] == 0)  return 0;
    if (i == rows - 1 && j == cols - 1)
        return a[i][j];
    else if (i == rows - 1)
        return a[i][j + 1];
    else if (j == cols - 1)
        return a[i + 1][j];
    else if (a[i][j] == 1)
        return count(a, i + 1, j) + count(a, i, j + 1);
    else
        return 0;
}

How can we improve the performance of this program?