Meet the Winners: Seva’s Innovation Challenge

Posted on by Katie McMillan

Seva Foundation Awards $480,000 to Five Teams Reimagining Eye Care

For nearly 50 years, Seva Foundation has done one thing relentlessly well: make quality eye care reach people the market forgot. Not through charity alone, but through calculated, disruptive innovation that has driven down the cost of care across the global eye care industry.

The Innovation Challenge is the latest chapter. Clinicians, researchers, and entrepreneurs from around the world submitted bold ideas to fight avoidable blindness and vision loss. Five winning teams will share a $480,000 prize pool.

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Why Business Insider featured our award-winning work

Posted on by Kate Moynihan

To understand how families escape poverty, you have to look at the barriers that stand between them and opportunity.

That’s why eye care isn’t just healthcare, it’s one of the smartest economic investments we can make. In more than 20 years of evaluating global health interventions, I’ve seen few solutions deliver such immediate returns for families while improving health, education, and livelihoods.

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We had a bold vision. You made it a reality.

Posted on by Julie Nestingen

2 million people, now with eye care. Thank you!

Earlier this month, we shared a bold vision: What if, together, we could bring permanent, life-changing eye care to over 2 million people?

And together, we are doing just that! Thanks to your incredible generosity, along with other Seva donors, we met the $250,000 match challenge, unlocking a total of $500,000 to launch 26 new Vision Centers worldwide, bringing eye care to the doorsteps of millions.

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It’s Like Coming Back to Life

Posted on by Seva Foundation

“It would be wonderful to regain my eyesight. I would like to give back to my family for all of this.”

These words belong to Oscar Rios, a 62-year-old proud father from Paraguay. For decades, Oscar was the person his family leaned on. When cataracts stole his sight, everything changed. Because a routine surgery was out of financial reach, he spent a full year in total blindness. 

Oscar didn’t just miss the light. More than anything, he missed being the pillar his family could count on, instead of having to rely on them to get by day to day.

You didn’t let his story end in the dark.

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Letter from the CEO/Executive Director – Spring 2026

Posted on by Kate Moynihan

Something has shifted. After decades of restoring sight – one surgery, one pair of glasses, one village at a time, Seva has crossed a threshold and I want you to be the first to understand what that means.

The research coming out of Guatemala this year stopped me cold. When we gave coffee harvesters eyeglasses, productivity jumped 8% within days. Every dollar spent returned $30 in combined wages and farm income. That result didn’t come from a new technology or a capital campaign. It came from a systems approach we have been quietly perfecting for 47 years; the disciplined belief that if you build the right infrastructure, train the right people, and measure what actually matters, the returns compound in ways that surprise even us.

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Built to Last: Eye Care in Cambodia

Posted on by Seva Foundation
Photos of Cambodian patients by Joe Raffanti.

For more than 25 years, Seva Foundation has been steadily changing the view in Cambodia. Since 1999, Seva’s long-term partnerships with national ministries, hospitals, and local nonprofits have helped reduce the country’s blindness rate from 1.2% to just 0.37%.

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