Holding an awl in one hand, and a man’s leather shoe in the other, Abraham in Kenya demonstrates how he pierces a hole in the leather before stitching it up to make a repair. It’s part of his job as a cobbler that, for months, he was unable to do.
A couple years ago, Abraham started having trouble with his vision. His work suffered as he had more and more difficulty focusing his eyes on the tiny stitches and delicate work of shoe repair. He began pricking himself repeatedly with the needles, and eventually, he couldn’t get the needles threaded at all. Finally, he had to shutter his business.
At age 65, Abraham’s six children are now grown up, but his income was essential to supporting his grandkids. Without being able to repair shoes, he had to rely on his wife’s earnings as a farmer to get by.
The loss of income wasn’t the only financial difficulty exacerbated by his vision loss. Because he couldn’t see well enough to punch in his PIN on his phone, Abraham started giving the number to shop attendants while making purchases. Eventually he realized that some of them were stealing from him and transferring additional money to themselves before handing the phone back over.
Abraham went to a nearby clinic for help with his vision. He received a prescription for eyedrops, but his condition continued to worsen despite regularly using the drops.
One day, Abraham met one of our community health volunteers, who was going house to house doing eye health screenings. The volunteer gave Abraham a referral to the eye unit at our partner facility, the Iten County Referral Hospital, where he was diagnosed with cataracts in both eyes.
Just weeks later, Abraham went back to the Iten Eye Unit. The surgeries on both eyes were a success, and when our staff caught up with him, they were impressed with how quickly he had bounced back. He has started repairing shoes again and is happy to be taking care of his family with the income. He has also become an eye health ambassador, telling his neighbours about the Iten Eye Unit and how eye surgery transformed his life.
Please consider making a donation to help more people like Abraham get back to work!
Story written with files from Caroline Ikumu.
For most of his adult life, Abraham made a living as a cobbler, supporting his wife and raising six children on his earnings. But several years ago, he started having trouble threading needles. Initially, he pricked himself repeatedly, and eventually, he couldn’t get the needles threaded at all. Due to his poor eyesight, Abraham had to shut down his shoe repair business.
His story is a common one. Global estimates suggest that people with moderate to severe vision impairment are about 30 per cent less likely to be employed than those with good eyesight.1 For lack of a pair of eyeglasses, for want of a simple cataract surgery, millions of people are unable to work. It can keep entire families stuck in the cycle of poverty.
Abraham’s story has a happy ending. After meeting a community health volunteer during a door-to-door eye health screening, he was diagnosed with bilateral cataracts and got sight-restoring surgery on both of his eyes at one of our partner hospitals. He started taking in shoes for repair once again.
But many people won’t get back to work like Abraham did. And that’s because basic eye care isn’t available or accessible to them. According to estimates, about 2.2 billion people worldwide have vision impairment, and in roughly half of those cases, the vision loss could have been prevented or hasn't yet been treated.2
For many people across the globe, the neighbourhood optometry clinic simply doesn’t exist. While people in Western Europe enjoy a ratio of one optometrist to every 3,877 people, countries in central sub-Saharan Africa reported a ratio of one to every 1,198,141 people, according to a 2023 study.3 Even when there is an eye care provider in a nearby city, the barriers to reaching them can be insurmountable for some people living in remote and rural areas. Many can’t afford the bus or train fare, let alone the fees for diagnosis and treatment. And for women and children, travelling alone can be dangerous, so they often need to wait for someone – usually the family breadwinner – to take time off work to escort them. For those with seriously impaired vision or other disabilities, travel might be nearly impossible.
Every day, the community health workers who do eye screenings on our behalf meet people who have previously tried to solve their vision issues without success. Many patients had visited the nearest healthcare provider, often a local dispensary, and were sent home with eyedrops or told their vision couldn’t be treated. Some had bounced around from clinic to clinic, others had resigned themselves to living out their days in blindness. That is why we are working hard to provide eye health care services at the community level.
By connecting people with our partner vision centres and hospitals, helping cover fees and offering safe transportation to the hospital, we can help restore vision to people who may never have gotten treatment otherwise. It’s just one of the ways we are working towards the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal number one: No Poverty. By addressing some of the root causes of poverty, like poor eyesight, we can help people stay employed and stay in school.
The global productivity loss attributed to impaired vision is estimated at US $411 billion annually.4 And those effects can be seen on the individual level as well.
A recent study looking at workers with presbyopia between the ages of 35-65 in Bangladesh found that those who had reading glasses made 33 per cent more than those who did not.5 The study, published in PLOS ONE, tracked the incomes of more than 10,000 participants who work in near-vision intensive occupations – like tailors, mechanics and carpenters – over eight months. Half of the participants received reading glasses right away, while the control group only got a pair after the eight months of data collection. The eyeglasses themselves cost only about US$3-4 per pair but had the potential to transform the lives of the workers.
Another study of tea pickers with presbyopia in India found similar results in 2018.6 In that case, the three-month study found that a pair of reading glasses increased productivity for the plantation workers – who are paid by the kilogram of leaves picked – by about 22 per cent, and 32 per cent for those over the age of 50.
As these studies show, addressing vision loss can increase productivity and provide greater economic opportunities for individuals.
Like many other health issues, it can be difficult to untangle the relationship between low incomes and eye health problems. Poor vision can lead to poverty because people often lose or quit their jobs when they’re no longer capable of doing them effectively or safely.
Take Junmoni in India, for example. The mother of two dreamed of sending her daughter to college with her earnings making handwoven fabrics on her loom. But when her vision became blurry, she had to stop weaving. Money got so tight that she was on the brink of selling her handloom. Fortunately she met a community health worker who told her she just needed to visit the local vision centre to get a pair of eyeglasses. Junmoni now wears her prescription eyeglasses while working at her handloom, her dreams for her daughter back on track.
But just as vision loss can lead to poverty, the opposite may also be true.
An infectious eye disease, called trachoma, continues to cause vision loss and blindness in dozens of countries around the world. It is widespread in some rural areas, and also in regions where there are high rates of poverty. The bacteria spreads through personal contact, via hands, clothes and bedding, and by flies that have been in contact with discharge from an infected person. It is most common in areas where people don’t have access to clean water or have to travel long distances for water.
If left untreated, trachoma causes the eyelashes to turn inward and scratch the cornea, leading to severe pain, vision loss and even blindness.
The spread of trachoma can be managed when people have access to clean water, allowing for more frequent hand and face washing, and the cleaning of clothing and bedding. Antibiotics can also help prevent and treat trachoma in areas where it is endemic.
We work with partners and communities in Ethiopia, Kenya and Zambia to prevent the spread of trachoma by helping establish water boreholes and latrines and administering antibiotics.
Ninety per cent of vision loss is preventable or treatable, but people living in underserved communities are more likely to go blind. In fact, 90 per cent of people with vision loss live in low- and middle-income countries, which is why we’re working in these areas.
Lack of education is another factor that keeps vision loss in lockstep with poverty. Some people don’t seek eye health care simply because they believe their condition is untreatable. Many older patients believe that vision loss, even blindness, is just an inevitable part of aging. In some communities there may be additional fear or distrust of medical authorities based on previous experiences, myths or other cultural stigmas.
By reaching people in their homes and communities through door-to-door eye screenings and eye camps, we can offer basic eye health education and choice to those who might never get treatment otherwise. And in cases where a patient might be hesitant to get surgery, our community-based approach enables health workers to continue counselling patients over weeks and months, reassuring them, explaining the benefits of a procedure and often convincing them to get treatment in the end.
Another way we work to prevent the devastating effects of vision loss is by making sure the youngest people in our project areas learn about eye health. By offering eye screenings and education in schools, organizations like ours can reach thousands of families through their children, who go home brimming with excitement over the vision test they took at school, and what they learned about eye health. By providing children with referrals to the nearest vision centre or partner hospital, the whole family is made aware of the services that are available to them.
The effects of a cataract surgery often ripple down through the beneficiary’s entire family. We hear of many young women who have given up jobs or dropped out of school to care for a senior family member who has gone blind. Once the family member has had their vision restored through cataract surgery, they often regain their independence, freeing up their caregiver to devote that time to work, school or other economic opportunities.
And parents who have had their vision problems corrected, like Junmoni, are better placed to keep their children in school longer, and even send them off to advanced education, potentially lifting future generations out of poverty.
Finally, children with vision problems who get corrective eyeglasses or treatment fare better at school. In fact, prescription eyeglasses have been shown to have a greater impact on academic achievement than other health interventions, like nutrition and deworming programs.7 This is why we are currently expanding our school eye health programs, so we can help more children thrive in school so they can get the best possible start on their working lives.
While many organizations like ours are collaborating with partners, governments and funders to address vision loss and blindness, aging populations and population growth mean that the problem will increase if we don’t act quickly. Some estimates say that by 2050, half of the global population will have myopia.8
You can help us continue our mission to prevent blindness and restore sight by following us on our social media accounts, signing up for our newsletter and sharing what you’ve learned with friends and family. Join our global community today.
The northeast Indian state of Meghalaya is known for its hilly terrain and rainy weather. While that makes for excellent tea-growing conditions, it also means that roads are often rugged, muddy and difficult to navigate.
For residents of remote communities, getting from the village into the city for healthcare can be challenging at the best of times.
It’s especially difficult for those experiencing vision loss.
Now, thanks to a new 14-seat TATA Winger Van, residents in the state’s South Garo Hills have better access to eye health care. The vehicle is bringing health care workers to the area’s most remote villages to deliver eye screenings and referrals, and to transport patients who need further diagnosis or treatment to the Patharkhmah Community Health Centre.
Operation Eyesight’s Dr. Ritu Ghosh handed over the keys to the vehicle to Dr Sapna Dey, State Program Manager, NPCB & VI, with Mr. Ram Kumar, MD NHM of the Government of Meghalaya in February, and the patient transport vehicle is now serving communities in the region.
Thanks to Dan Parlow, member of the Operation Eyesight Canada Board of Directors, for the donation that made this patient transport vehicle possible!
Herding cows is such a fundamental part of Maasai culture that it is common to hear people in that community greeting each other with, “I hope your cattle are well!”
So, when 70-year-old Parmuat, a Maasai herder in Kajiado County, Kenya, thought he might have to sell off his cows, he was devastated.
Several years ago, Parmuat looked outside his home and couldn’t see his cows anywhere. When he found them, he realized they had been right in front of him all along, on a hill near the house. He hadn’t been able to see them because of his increasingly blurry eyesight.
As his vision got worse, Parmuat found it harder and harder to care for his herd. He didn’t know how else to make an income, and he worried that he and his wife would become a burden to their 12 children, now grown up and raising families of their own.
Parmuat’s luck changed when a community health assistant, whom we’d trained in primary eye care, knocked on his door during a door-to-door eye screening and diagnosed him with cataracts.
Just a few weeks later, Parmuat learned he would be among the first patients to get cataract surgery at the new eye unit at the Kajiado County Referral Hospital.
After surgery, when a nurse removed the gauze from his eyes, Parmuat marveled at his restored vision. “Everything was clear again,” he says, “as if the sun suddenly came up.”
Now back at home with his wife, Parmuat says that he doesn’t need to sell any cows. In fact, he adds with a twinkle, he’s thinking about buying a couple more.
With files from Patrick Wainaina
The oldest of four kids, 14-year-old Isaac is his mother’s biggest helper – assisting with chores like cleaning, sweeping and looking after his younger siblings. But a few years back, Isaac started having problems finding things around the house.
One day, his mom, Samanta, sent him outside to sweep the compound, but he came back complaining that he couldn’t locate the broom. When she went to look for herself, she saw the broom lying on the porch in plain sight and realized there was something wrong with Isaac’s eyesight.
As a single mom, Samanta works hard as a trader in the marketplace in their village of Oponso, in Ghana’s Central Region. She knew that an eye exam, and any subsequent treatments, would be out of her budget.
Hope arrived during an eye health screening at Isaac’s school, where staff identified his eye condition. His younger sister, five-year-old Grace, also got a referral for further examination. The school eye health screening was made possible through our partnerships with Ghana Health Service and Ghana Education Service and funded by the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID’s) Child Blindness Program.
The program trains community health nurses and school employees to perform basic eye screenings. Students requiring follow-up receive referrals to the nearest hospital. Because of the increased efficiency, entire schools – students and teachers alike – can be screened in a fraction of the time it would take otherwise.
Samanta brought the two children to our partner hospital, Watborg Eye Services, in nearby Accra, and both received diagnoses for cataracts. They were quickly scheduled in for surgery, which was provided free of charge.
Three weeks later, our program staff caught up with Samanta, who was thrilled with her children’s progress, now that they are free from cataracts. She says little Grace now spends more time outside playing with her friends. As for Isaac, he once again helps around the house, happy that his future is back in focus.
With story and photo files from Isaac Owusu Baffoe
This story was made possible by the generous support of the American people through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The contents are the responsibility of Operation Eyesight Canada and do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID or the United States Government.
Having undergone cataract surgery himself, Vijay Verma knows just how important good vision is to quality of life.
“The gift of eyesight is the best thing you can give to anybody. It just changes their whole world,” he says. “You can make donations for food and things like that, but it disappears after two days. Eyesight stays forever.”
The longtime donor first heard about Operation Eyesight as a member of the India Club of Vancouver. The group raised more than $100,000 for our programs over the years through annual walkathons in Stanley Park, with Vijay overseeing the event during his years as club president.
Supporting Operation Eyesight has also been a family affair for the Vermas, with Vijay’s wife, Shiksha, and their three grown children all involved in fundraising activities. Now, a third generation is also making a difference. In the past few years, two of the Verma’s grandchildren raised $575 apiece through online fundraising campaigns.
Thank you, Vijay and family, for your incredible support!
Reaching the remote village of Kachikata, in India’s northeastern Assam state, is no small task. The journey from Jorhat, the nearest city, begins by jeep on rough roads leading down to the Brahmaputra River. From there, travellers climb onto a tiny ferry, big enough only for a handful of passengers, that takes them to Majuli Island. After the boat arrives on the island’s shores, the journey continues by motorcycle, tractor or bullock cart to reach the village.
This makes medical care difficult to access, especially for seniors like Gadami.
For six years, the grandmother lived with cataracts in both eyes. As her vision worsened, she became reliant on family members to help with even simple tasks.
“There was no doctor, no eye camp, nothing,” says our Program Manager Tapobrat Bhuyan, describing the community when he first visited it in 2021.
When community health volunteer, Dipen, met Gadami during a door-to-door screening, he referred her to a nearby eye camp. There, she was diagnosed with bilateral cataracts, and agreed to make the long journey to Jorhat, where she received sight-restoring surgery at our partner hospital, Chandraprabha Eye Hospital, free of charge.
Gadami’s granddaughter, Junu, was by her side to comfort her during the hospital stay and share in her joy when the bandages came off.
Back in Kachikata, Gadami’s world has opened up. With her independence restored, she can once again walk around the village, visit friends and fully enjoy her time with her grandchildren.
Watch a video about our work on Majuli Island!
At first, a trachoma infection looks a bit like a case of pink eye: red, irritated eyes, maybe some swelling and discharge1. But for many people in the world, a trachoma infection is a serious concern. If left untreated, it can lead to severe pain, vision loss and even blindness. The bacteria that cause trachoma spread through direct personal contact, through shared towels and clothing, and through flies that have been in contact with an infected person. And there’s a simple solution for reducing its spread…
Clean water.
When communities have access to abundant clean water, they can wash their hands and faces regularly, do laundry more often, and prevent the otherwise relentless transmission of the disease. That’s why we are working hard with communities and partner organizations to make sure that the people in our project areas have access to a local, sustainable clean water source.
There’s been a lot of good news in the eradication of trachoma in recent years. In 2023 alone, Benin, Iraq and Mali each received certification from the World Health Organization (WHO) for eliminating trachoma as a public health problem. Also, the number of people at risk of getting the infection fell from 125 million in 2022 to 115.7 million in 2023, a significant reduction.2
But the hard work must go on.
Ethiopia has some of the highest rates of trachoma worldwide, with the prevalence in the Amhara Region estimated to be nearly 63 per cent. In that country, trachoma is the second leading cause of blindness overall.3
Trachoma continues to infect people in 42 countries and has caused blindness or visual impairment in roughly 1.9 million people. It remains the leading infectious cause of blindness worldwide. And the effect on the workforce in these countries is huge. According to a recent paper by the WHO, the loss of productivity due to trachoma costs somewhere between US $3-8 billion each year.4
To people like Stephen, in Narok County, Kenya, having trachoma meant not being able to support his family. The father of four, who works as a motorcycle courier, struggled with the infection for years. He tried eye drops, eyeglasses and several surgeries before the trichiasis in his right eye, caused by repeat trachoma infections, was fully resolved.
Since undergoing a successful final surgery at one of our partner hospitals, the young man now acts as an eye health ambassador in his community, making sure people know what the infection is, the role of hygiene in stopping its spread, and how to get it treated.
Years of repeat infection from trachoma causes scarring to the eyelid. This scarring can be so severe that the eyelid turns inward, causing the eyelashes to rub against the eyeball. This leads to severe pain, light intolerance and scarring of the cornea.
If left untreated, the damage to the cornea can cause vision impairment, usually between the ages of 30 to 40 years5, although it can happen in children as well. Trachoma causes 1.4 per cent of blindness globally.6
Women become blind from trachoma four times as often as men. This is likely due to frequent infections they get while caring for small children, who often pass trachoma on to others.
At Operation Eyesight, we follow the WHO’s SAFE strategy for controlling and preventing trachoma. SAFE stands for:
S: Surgery to treat trichiasis (the painful late stage of the disease)
A: Antibiotics to eliminate infection
F: Face washing and hygiene education
E: Environmental improvement including wells and latrines
The foundation for the strategy is environmental improvement, namely – providing access to clean water. Over the decades, we’ve worked with communities to rehabilitate and drill hundreds of boreholes. In recent years, most of our work with water has been concentrated in Zambia and Kenya, but we are also getting involved in more water projects in Ethiopia as we expand our programs there.
Along with drilling and rehabilitation, we work with local governments to make sure people can fix the boreholes when they break down. In Zambia, that means financing the training of volunteers called Area Pump Minders (APMs) to do routine maintenance and repair of boreholes. The program helps ensure that there is a system for repair work, with locally-available toolkits and spare parts, and that monitoring of the water supply is happening at the village level. In addition to helping their communities, some of the APMs go on to find paid work repairing privately-owned boreholes. Over the last two years, we’ve seen several women join the traditionally all-male teams, and we hope to recruit more in future.
The community involvement doesn’t stop there. We also work with volunteers to form WASH committees who help educate other people, especially children, in Water, Sanitation and Hygiene. In Ethiopia, we are working with partners to train teachers in WASH so they can pass on their knowledge to thousands of students. Our work in Ethiopia has also involved fixing up latrines and providing menstrual supplies, both of which can help keep teenaged girls in school longer.
Antibiotics also go a long way to preventing and treating existing cases of trachoma. We work with local governments and partner organizations to provide these antibiotics to areas with high prevalence of trachoma. Earlier this year, we collaborated with partners in a Mass Drug Administration project in Kenya’s Narok County. Despite wet road conditions that made it challenging for crews to access all the communities, the project managed to administer the antibiotic azithromycin to more than 215,000 people!
Throughout the process, our trained community health volunteers work tirelessly to provide education on the importance of facial cleanliness and environmental improvements in stopping the spread of trachoma.
Finally, with help from our generous donors, our partner hospitals can offer surgeries free of charge to people with advanced stages of trichiasis to alleviate the pain and prevent further loss of sight.
We’re involved in clean water projects as a means of preventing trachoma, but the effects of providing clean water to communities are countless. The installation and maintenance of boreholes prevents dozens of waterborne diseases that sicken and threaten the lives of many, and that keep whole communities trapped in the cycle of poverty. Sustainable boreholes help people grow gardens full of fresh vegetables, allow them to raise livestock and improve the quality of life for everyone around them.
The effects of access to clean water are especially beneficial to women and girls. Here’s why:
Education and economic opportunities: In many communities, women and girls are responsible for fetching water, a task that can be extremely time consuming and physically demanding. This can prevent girls from attending school and women from pursuing income-generating activities. When clean water is locally available, girls are more likely to complete their schooling, and women have more time for activities that empower them economically.
Reduced gender-based violence: Providing access to clean water within communities reduces the need for women and girls to travel long distances for water, decreasing their vulnerability to the violence and harassment that they risk when collecting water.
Hygiene and menstrual health: Clean water is essential for maintaining proper hygiene, including menstrual sanitation. When women have access to clean water and sanitation facilities, it positively affects their overall health and dignity.
Community development: Women are often key contributors to the well-being of their communities. When they have access to clean water, they can actively take part in and lead initiatives that enhance the overall living conditions in their communities.
In 2023, we partnered on two new boreholes at schools in Ethiopia’s Amhara Region. In Zambia, we repaired 25 boreholes in the Mkushi District, trained 20 new Area Pump Minders and set up more WASH committees.
You can help us continue our water projects in 2024 by making a donation today. Thank you for your support!
Taking a closer look at the connections between avoidable vision loss and gender inequalities
The oldest of five children, Thandiwe in Zambia has always looked after her younger siblings. When the village borehole broke down, she had to fetch water from the river, and her family couldn’t wash as often. Thandiwe noticed some of her siblings had itchy, red eyes. Soon, she developed the same eye condition. Her left eye swelled and her eyelid turned inward, causing unbearable pain as her eyelashes scratched her cornea. With no money or access to a doctor, her eye became worse and worse until she lost vision in it entirely.
Priya in Nepal can’t remember when she first started having trouble seeing, but her vision kept deteriorating until one day she fell and injured herself while climbing the steep trail leading from the village to her house. Figuring that blindness was an inevitable part of old age, she stayed at home, unable to visit friends and grandchildren. Eventually she couldn’t even reach the outhouse without assistance. She felt like a burden to her family.
Mary, in Kenya, loved school from her very first day in the classroom and dreamed of becoming a teacher someday. After she turned 13, she started having trouble reading the chalk board. She had to copy notes from her friends and couldn’t do her homework in the dim light at her house. Her grades began to slip. She asked her parents to take her to an eye doctor, but money was too tight because they were saving to send her brother to college. By age 15, Mary quit school and decided to get married, her hopes of teaching now crushed.
None of these characters are real, but they represent the millions of women and girls around the world who are living with avoidable vision loss and blindness. We hear stories like these every day.
The prevalence of vision loss is higher among women and girls than it is for men and boys; 55 per cent of people experiencing vision loss are female. And while there are some biological factors at play, the reasons for these discrepancies are largely social.
Why women and girls experience more vision impairment
Women live on average longer than men, and many conditions that rob people of their sight are associated with old age. This includes cataract, presbyopia, glaucoma and age-related macular degeneration. According to estimates, two-thirds of cataract blindness globally occurs in women.
Traditional gender roles are another factor, especially in some regions.
Women and girls are two to four times more likely than men and boys to get trachoma – the leading infectious cause of blindness worldwide. Trachoma is caused by bacteria that spreads through contact on hands and clothing. Small children are especially susceptible, and in turn, they often pass it on to their caretakers. Women and girls may also get infected from household cleaning and doing laundry.
Obstacles to eye health care access
The barriers to health care for women and girls vary widely from region to region, but there are trends that we can observe across the countries where we work. These include:
Addressing these diverse challenges is crucial for breaking down the barriers that prevent women and girls from accessing essential eye health care services.
Working toward gender equality
Our approach, called the “Hospital-Based Community Eye Health Program Model,” is designed to address inequalities to accessing eye health care, starting at the village level.
Most of the community health workers trained by Operation Eyesight’s partner hospitals are women, which gives them the opportunity to become trusted leaders in their communities and helps them contribute to family finances. They also bring eye health screenings to people’s doorsteps, meaning that women and girls don’t need to travel to get primary eye care and referrals.
Additionally, we work with our partner hospitals to establish vision centres closer to the communities where we work, making it easier for everyone to access diagnosis and treatment. Our partner hospitals also provide safe transportation for patients – usually by bus – to the hospital so that they can get their surgeries without worrying about how they’ll get there.
Finally, by providing surgeries, eyeglasses and other treatments free of charge – or at a highly subsidized rate – we can decrease some of the financial barriers women and girls face. We strive to provide quality eye care services to everyone – regardless of gender, age, ability to pay or other personal circumstances.
Clean water for gender equality
In a village in Zambia’s Mkushi District, a group of men and women stand over a water borehole, tools scattered at their feet. Two of the women turn a pipe with wrenches, their faces furrowed in concentration.
These men and women are Area Pump Minders in training – volunteers who fix and maintain water pumps in their communities. The pump minders are just one of our strategies for keeping communities supplied with a reliable source of clean water. As well as rehabilitating boreholes, we also work with communities to drill new ones, and provide training in WASH – which stands for Water, Sanitation and Hygiene.
While traditionally the pump minder volunteers were all men, we’re seeing more women join the teams. Between 2022 and 2023, we trained half a dozen women in borehole maintenance and repair in Zambia, placing the skills to keep the water flowing in the hands of those who need it most.
Clean water means that families can wash hands, faces and clothing regularly, which prevents the spread of trachoma – lessening the chance of vision loss and blindness, particularly among women. And there are countless other ripple effects for women and girls when they have access to clean water. It helps with the maintenance of menstrual hygiene, impacting health, dignity and overall quality of life. And, as women and girls are usually tasked with hauling water for their families, having a nearby borehole can help keep girls in school and give women more time to pursue economic activities to support their families.
Dismantling gender-related eye health myths in the foothills of the Himalayas
In the villages of the Udhampur block in northern India, vision problems are often seen as a sign of bad luck. A girl wearing glasses might be told she’ll never have a good marriage, and a baby’s bad eyesight might be blamed on past life sins. A girl with a squint could be seen as a curse for the whole family.
Those are some of the beliefs a recent pilot project took aim at.
Created in partnership with NorQuest College and the Rotary Eye & ENT Hospital, the project provided services through a “Mobile Vision Centre” – a four-wheel-drive van staffed with an eye health team comprised mostly of women. The van roamed the area’s rugged roads, bringing primary eye care and education to people’s doorsteps.
More than 27,000 people received training pertaining to eye health myths during the project duration. A before-and-after survey that checked people’s attitudes and beliefs regarding eye health for girls and women showed dramatic differences after the intervention. With that success in mind, our teams are looking to implement strategies from the project throughout our programs.
Read our new Global Strategy to find out how we plan to continue providing essential eye health care to women and girls and other underserved groups. Donate today to help us bring quality eye health care to more women and girls.
The ancient art of ‘tea plucking”’ requires the picker to identify and pluck only the freshest, newest shoots on the tea plant. It requires dexterity, speed and, most importantly, excellent eyesight.
So, imagine trying to pick tea efficiently when your eyes are clouded over with cataracts.
This was the situation for 36-year-old Milan, who lives at the Nahorjan Tea Estate in Assam, India.
He had worked as a tea picker for years before his vision started to fade. When his wife passed away suddenly, he was left alone to support their four young children. Shortly after, his eyesight reduced so much that he was able to detect little more than hand movement in front of his eyes.
Robbed of his ability to work, Milan and his children moved in with his father, leaving the burden of supporting the family on the aging grandfather.
“Assam tea is the best tea in the world, but while plucking the tea, the workers have more exposure to sunlight,” says Operation Eyesight Project Manager Tapobrat Bhuyan. “Sadly, long hours of exposure to solar radiation can contribute to the early development of cataracts.”
Hope arrived for Milan in February when he attended a screening camp at the tea estate, which we had organized with our local partner Chandraprabha Eye Hospital.
Days later, the hospital sent a bus to collect Milan and other patients to transport them for their surgeries in the nearby city of Jorhat. Milan underwent phacoemulsification surgery on both eyes, a technique that is considered the gold standard in cataract removal because it reduces recovery time.
About a month later, Milan was back at work picking tea. He’s grateful that he can once again support his family. Thanks to the compassion of our partners and donors like you, he and his children have hope for a brighter future.
Click here to make a difference in the life of a family like Milan's today.