Children’s lives and sight are at risk: many children born with potentially blinding or life-threatening eye conditions are at risk of not having that detected or referred for essential treatment.
Read more about our Dream Big: Game-changing eye care project.
In many low-and-middle-income countries, eye screening is not routinely performed outside of urban centres, as it requires reliable electricity and an ophthalmoscope, which is expensive.
Our innovation is to scale up use of the Arclight, a low-cost, solar-powered, effective and easy to use hand-held ophthalmoscope developed by the University of St Andrews, to transform the way eye care is delivered around the world.
We will train more nurses and midwives in the countries where we work to conduct essential eye health screening for children and especially newborn infants.
Alongside the training and screening processes, we will use the evidence of our success to advocate to national governments and stakeholders to scale up the innovation worldwide.
We want governments to integrate essential eye health screening into the training of nurses and midwives, to integrate our approach in referral and reporting systems, commit treatment funds and improve treatment capacity.
Our aim is to save the sight and lives of children across the world.
The Arclight is a low cost, simple to use yet highly effective alternative to traditional ophthalmoscopes. The Arclight can be used to easily and quickly screen for all major blinding eye diseases. Being solar powered it avoids the need for electricity or expensive and often hard to source batteries.
Further, by screening at birth, our innovation ensues maximum coverage, when parents and their newborns are in the presence of health professionals. Girls and boys will equally benefit, and the possibility that girls’ eye health goes unchecked, as is often the case as girls grow older, is substantially reduced.
We will work in the 26 countries where we have long-standing local partners.
We will work with local partners, Ministries of Health and other stakeholders to establish this transformative approach to eye care around the world.
To invest and help us save the lives and sight of children around the world, please get in touch with our CEO Kirsty Smith and our Director of International Programmes Matthew Hanning
