Background

It is estimated that 1 in every 100 Africans are blind – certainly, thousands of individuals in Iganga District suffer from eye disease, cataracts, and blindness.  Often these eye problems are caused by other health concerns such as child malnutrition, malaria, water-borne disease, and lack of sanitation.  In the village, poor sight and blindness are not merely personal concerns – the resulting lack of productivity may deprive a family of food, income, school tuition, further medical care for children, etc.

Many of the most common eye problems in Iganga could be easily treated, but are not.  Cataracts (a gradual clouding of the eye due to denaturation of proteins in the lens) can often be repaired through minor surgery, yet many Iganga villagers go slowly blind because of them.  Trachoma, an infectious eye disease caused by bacteria and spread through contact, can be easily medicated in its early stages, or corrected by surgery in the later stages, yet entire families suffer from and even go blind because of it.

Repairing Eye Conditions

In the past, UVP has engaged in a number of programs involving eye health – we have performed visual acuity tests and have distributed eyeglasses, we bought a Focometer to Iganga to establish a permanent eye care program at a partner clinic, People and Development Initiative (PADI), and we have trained local healthcare workers and schoolteachers to screen patients for treatable eye diseases, and then treated those individuals with curable conditions.

Through Healthy Villages, we partner with a group called Sight Savers International (SSI), a UK-based non-profit which works to eliminate avoidable blindness and promote equality of opportunity for disabled people in the developing world.  In partnership with SSI, we train one individual in each village, often a member of the UVP-founded Village Health Team, to recognize and diagnose various eye problems.  We then treat and repair villagers with curable eye problems, and rehabilitate and educate villagers with non-curable eye problems so that they may live as normally as possible.  Our ability to repair villagers is due, in great part, to our generous partners at ChooseANeed who helped us raise funds to buy a generator, which we now lend out to SSI-trained surgeons who conduct the eye surgeries.

By training a “village eye specialist,” we create sustainable change through education – ten or twenty years down the line the village eye specialist, or even a future trainee of that specialist, will be able to diagnose families with trachoma, refer them to the closest health center which treats trachoma, and then advise them on how to increase household sanitation so as not to be re-infected by trachoma.

A volunteer helps to screen community members for eyesight problems deep in the village