A $15 million grant from billionaire philanthropist Mackenzie Scott to VisionSpring, a social enterprise, will go toward providing eyeglasses to farmers and artisans in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. It is believed to be the largest single gift the vision sector has ever received.
Founded in 2001, VisionSpring draws a connection between vision and opportunity.
“As soon as we said, ‘It’s not about the glasses, it’s about everything that comes after the glasses — It’s not about the eyeball. It’s not about sight. It’s about vision, and what clear vision makes possible — our world of partnerships just grew exponentially,” Ella Gudwin, CEO of VisionSpring, told Devex.
The $15 million grant will kick-start VisionSpring’s new $70 million campaign called Livelihoods in Focus, which aims to improve the incomes of coffee, tea, cocoa, and artisan workers in India, Bangladesh, Ghana, Kenya, and Uganda by fixing the issue of blurry vision, which holds back their earning potential. The initiative aims to reach 6 million people by 2030 and to unlock some $1 billion of new income.
VisionSpring is targeting these communities because their work is vision-intensive. It hopes to replicate and scale the success it’s had giving eyeglasses to workers in a tea-growing region of Assam, India.
While vision impairment has been a blind spot in the global development agenda, the Scott grant points to growing momentum for addressing uncorrected refractive error, or blurry vision, as a poverty intervention.
In a competitive fundraising landscape where organizations are advocating for life or death issues, Gudwin and her peers in the vision sector have been working to build the evidence base for the benefits of correcting vision.
For example, in Assam, where VisionSpring has worked for 20 years, a randomized control trial found that a pair of eyeglasses can make workers 22% to 32% more productive, meaning they can harvest more by hand.
And more studies are underway with the goal of demonstrating the impact and quantifying the return on investment for prospective donors and partners — whether high net worth individuals such as Scott, corporate partners, or governments, Gudwin said.
Gudwin and her allies in the vision sector often point to how eyeglasses are a 700-year-old technology with immediate benefits.
So it’s really just a matter of creating scalable models for deploying eyeglasses that go beyond hospitals and clinics and into communities, Gudwin said. VisionSpring provides vision screening, affordable eyeglasses, and training, working with nonprofits, corporate clients, government agencies, and other partners. While its primary focus is on livelihoods, its portfolio also includes helping kids in classrooms and drivers on roads, Gudwin said.
The $15 million grant is a major one for VisionSpring and represents nearly two years’ worth of its standard philanthropic raise, she added.
Around the world, 1 billion people do not have the glasses they need to see clearly, meaning they live with vision impairment and all the challenges that come with that.
A new World Health Organization report on eye care reveals that in high-income settings, there is 92% effective coverage of refractive error, meaning screening and provision of eyeglasses, whereas in low-income settings, that coverage is not quite at 15%.
This provides, for the first time, baseline data against which to monitor progress on efforts to close the vision care gap, after the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution on vision, committing to eye care for all by 2030.The World Health Assembly has also endorsed global eye care targets.
Gudwin said she expects the gift from Scott will raise visibility of the fact that correcting blurry vision is not just a health intervention, but also about livelihoods, road safety, and education, among other priorities.
About the author
Catherine Cheneycatherinecheney
Catherine Cheney is the Senior Editor for Special Coverage at Devex. She leads the editorial vision of Devex’s news events and editorial coverage of key moments on the global development calendar. Catherine joined Devex as a reporter, focusing on technology and innovation in making progress on the Sustainable Development Goals. Prior to joining Devex, Catherine earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Yale University, and worked as a web producer for POLITICO, a reporter for World Politics Review, and special projects editor at NationSwell. She has reported domestically and internationally for outlets including The Atlantic and the Washington Post. Catherine also works for the Solutions Journalism Network, a non profit organization that supports journalists and news organizations to report on responses to problems.
