Great examples of this occur in our  programs in Ghana and Kenya, where we partner with Seeing is Believing to eliminate avoidable blindness by integrating primary eye care into the primary health care system.

Thanks to support from donors like you, our eye care programs are hard at work within the countries’ existing health structures and systems. We help hospitals help themselves by identifying gaps in human resources and improving facilities; and we work with communities to target their specific eye care needs and empower them to take ownership of their eye health.

By educating staff members at partner hospitals on all aspects of eye health care, we help instill appreciation of the importance of the eye care programs they’re helping to implement. This builds the staff’s pride and ownership of their work!

This approach has served us well in reducing costs and improving patient services, while ensuring the continuity of the project. Our sustainable practices ensure our programs – and the community benefits they provide – last well after funding has ended.

Because of donors like you, we’re able to implement cost-effective programs that eliminate avoidable blindness on a sustainable basis. Thanks to you, we’re one step closer to realizing this exciting vision − For All The World To See!

The post The effects of your generosity goes on – long after our work is done! appeared first on Operation Eyesight.

Since we announced our first avoidable blindness-free village in 2014, it’s no secret that Operation Eyesight’s work takes place at the community level. That’s where ending avoidable blindness begins, as part of our approach to provide education about eye health and create lasting eye health care.

But as we’ve learned, it isn’t enough to simply approach a community with these objectives. In the past, when we’ve done this, decisions were largely made by our partner hospitals on behalf of the people living in the community. This turned out to be a major barrier to achieving our objectives. We’ve realized that community participation in any project is a critical part of the program.

Upper Tepesia in India’s Assam state is a great example of this approach, which we call Participatory Approach to Community Eye Health (PACEH). In this village, like in other communities, staff members from Operation Eyesight and hospital partners visited the area to understand the actual needs of the community and seek the community’s input.

This input is combined with data about the prevalence of blindness, socio-economic status and eye care availability and is used to tailor our approach. We were pleased to declare Upper Tepesia an avoidable blindness-free village on September 10, 2015!

We also follow PACEH when it comes to Vision Centres, which are permanent, staffed eye care service centres. When establishing a Vision Centre, there is a long list of criteria we use, but our staff also visit the location and meet with community members. This ensures our Vision Centres are placed for maximum effectiveness.

Because we believe in involving communities in the design and implementation of projects that impact their wellbeing, we use PACEH in all of our Indian projects. With PACEH and our donors’ support, we’ll help make many more villages like Upper Tepesia free of avoidable blindness!

We hope you will consider ‘adopting’ a community’s eye care needs today. Thank you for your support as we work to eliminate avoidable blindness once and for all!

The post Communities become part of the solution appeared first on Operation Eyesight.

For years now, we’ve known that next to cataracts, the second leading cause of avoidable blindness in developing countries throughout the world is failed cataract surgeries. It’s a terrible shame. And yet, it continues!

The practice of offering substandard care to eye patients is fueled by the urgency to reduce the huge crowd of people still waiting for cataract surgery. But there is another way to look at this, and that is through the eyes of people threatened by blindness.

In my last blog post, I asked you to picture a poor Indian woman who is going blind from cataracts. If we could actually take the time to know her, we would learn why she refused free medical help. We may discover that she has some questions of her own, such as, “Why are you offering to do this for me?” and “Can I really trust you?”

We got to know thousands of others with similar stories. We did it by recruiting people from these same villages and teaching them about basic eye care. These Community Health Workers were trained to take this knowledge back to their villages and share it with the people. We learned a lot from the people, and they learned a lot of about eye health and the hospitals that wanted to help them.

For the hospitals we support, the concept and practice of quality permeates the whole organization. What I described in the last paragraph is quality that cannot be easily measured: service to individuals, trust and respect. This goes hand-in-hand with quality that can be measured: hospital cleanliness, clinical outcomes, infection rates, etc.

If these hospitals follow accepted international protocols and standards, failures from infection are kept to a minimum. This translates into good outcomes, and word gets around – reputation and trust is built. Out in the surrounding villages, the community workers help alleviate patients’ fears, and they facilitate the process of diagnosis, treatment and recovery.

This cycle of relationship and healing just keeps rolling along, contributing to sustainability. In fact, we have a saying: “Sustainability is a by-product of quality.” And that is how avoidable blindness is reduced in an entire district – people within reach of the hospital have the opportunity to get the help they need, and blindness that can be treated or prevented becomes a thing of the past.

At Operation Eyesight, we are also working to eliminate the backlog of people who are blind from cataracts. But our commitment to the poor of India and Africa requires that we take their needs and fears seriously.

That tribal woman I mentioned? She can see now. And she says thanks.

Learn more about the difference our Community Health Workers are making!

The post We must see through their eyes (Part 2 of 2) appeared first on Operation Eyesight.

Our regional director for Africa, Ghanaian ophthalmologist Dr. Boateng Wiafe, has worked closely with the ministries of health in Zambia, Kenya, Rwanda and Ghana for many years. He and his staff have discovered that such collaboration within existing health systems encourages local leaders to manage their own affairs, while creating models that can be replicated in other regions.

“Operation Eyesight empowers Africans to take care of Africans,” he says.

In her 2009 book, The Challenge for Africa: A New Vision, the late Kenyan activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai wrote, “The challenge for [Africa’s] leaders, both governmental and nongovernmental, is to acknowledge and then channel Africans’ capabilities and energies into effective action for development.”

We believe international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) that choose to support and build on resident expertise can create long-term sustainable solutions that respect and steward the talents and abilities inherent in Africans. Developing countries understand their social and economic challenges and usually have the expertise to solve their own problems. They may only lack sufficient human and financial resources, and that’s where we can help.

Operation Eyesight has had notable success using these strategies. We invite other INGOs to contact us to learn more about our approach to sustainable development.

We have many great stories to share with you about the difference our donors have made in Africa and India… check out our success stories today!

The post Options are available to help developing African countries (Part 2 of 2) appeared first on Operation Eyesight.