Sight restoration

What we fund

A cataract clouds the lens of the eye until light can no longer reach the retina in focus. It is the commonest cause of blindness in the world and one of the most treatable: the clouded lens is removed through a small incision and replaced with a clear plastic one, usually under local anaesthetic, usually in less than thirty minutes. In much of the world the operation is not available to people who need it, or costs more than a family earns in a season.

We pay partner hospitals a fixed sum for each operation on a patient who cannot pay, so that the hospital is never out of pocket for treating them. The sum covers the surgery, the lens, the follow-up visit and transport for the patient and one companion. It does not depend on which lens is used.

We also fund corneal transplants through eye banks in Nepal, Kenya and Viet Nam, and, for a small number of people blind from retinal disease, retinal implants: a microelectrode array placed on the retina that turns images from a camera into patterns of light the brain can learn to read. These are expensive, the results vary widely, and we fund them only through four specialist centres that agree to publish every outcome.

Training the people who operate

Nine in ten of the operations we fund are done by surgeons trained in the country where they work. We pay for training places at regional eye hospitals, for the simulators that let trainees practise before they touch a patient, and for twelve Kiroshi Fellowships each year, which bring surgeons to Tokyo, Nairobi or Lalitpur for a year of supervised work. The fellowships are described on the fellowships page.