Tag: Research

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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

$1 Trillion Lost to Poor Vision – See the Difference You’re Making

Posted on by Kate Moynihan
Photo by Jon Kaplan.
Photo by Jon Kaplan.

Every day, I’m reminded that restoring sight is about more than vision – it brings back opportunity, dignity, and hope. Thanks to you, Seva’s story is one of progress: children are learning again, parents are returning to work, and entire communities are thriving.

Continue reading →

How the Young Will See Their Future – and the cost to all of us if they don’t

Posted on by Kate Moynihan
Photo of David Mukisa by Joe Raffanti.
Photo by Joe Raffanti: From the age of two, David Mukisa from Busia, Uganda, lived with poor eyesight, affecting every aspect of his young life. When he was seven, his mother joined a group traveling to Seva-supported Benedictine Eye Hospital. There, he was diagnosed with cataracts, and received bilateral cataract surgeries for free. “Fortunately he could be treated, even though I didn’t have money,” said David’s mom Alexia. ”A great weight has been lifted from my heart.”

Last month, the Seva Foundation and The International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness released a groundbreaking report revealing a striking truth:

Children with vision loss learn at half the rate of those with good or corrected vision. Put another way – every year, 6.3 million school years are lost due to uncorrected vision, amounting to $173 billion in future earnings each year. Imagine the impact if those kids could simply see the board. What innovations would emerge? What challenges could these young minds overcome?

Continue reading →

Seva Foundation Releases Landmark Child Eye Report for World Sight Day

Posted on by Dr. Brad Wong, Chief Economist, Seva Foundation
Photo of Nepali students by Praful Lal Shresta.

Across low-and-middle-income countries, less than half of 10-year-old children can read. This alarming phenomenon has been labelled by education experts around the world as the global ‘learning crisis’: A bitter-sweet situation in which we have achieved near universal primary education, including gender parity, but in which children are not achieving sufficient mastery of basic literacy and numeracy.

Policymakers will need to use a variety of tools to address the learning deficit. One promising but under-considered intervention is hiding in plain sight: eyeglasses.

Continue reading →