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A simple way to improve a billion lives: eyeglasses

PANIPAT, India — More than 1 billion people around the world need eyeglasses but don’t have them, researchers say, an affliction long overlooked on lists of public health priorities.

“Many of these kids are classified as poor learners or just dumb and therefore don’t progress at school,” said Kovin Naidoo, global director of Our Children’s Vision, an organization that provides free or inexpensive eyeglasses across Africa. “That just adds another hurdle to countries struggling to break the cycle of poverty.”

In 2015, only $37 million was spent on delivering eyeglasses to people in the developing world, less than one percent of resources devoted to global health issues, according to EYElliance, a nonprofit group trying to raise money and bring attention to the problem of uncorrected vision.

So far, the group’s own fundraising has yielded only a few million dollars, according to its organizers. It has enlisted Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the former Liberian president, among others, in an attempt to catapult the issue onto global development wish lists. They contend that an investment in improving sight would pay off. The World Health Organization has estimated the problem costs the global economy more than $200 billion annually in lost productivity.

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Activists point out that responding to the world’s vision crisis does not require the invention of new drugs or solving nettlesome issues like distributing refrigerated vaccines in countries with poor infrastructure. Factories in Thailand, China and the Philippines can manufacture so-called readers for less than 50 cents a pair; prescription glasses that correct nearsightedness can be produced for $1.50.

But money alone won’t easily solve systemic challenges faced by countries like Uganda, which has just 45 eye doctors for a nation of 41 million. In rural India, glasses are seen as a sign of infirmity, and in many places, a hindrance for young women seeking to get married. Until last year, Liberia did not have a single eye clinic.

On a recent afternoon, hundreds of children in powder-blue uniforms giddily jostled one another in the dusty courtyard of a high school in Panipat, two hours north of New Delhi. The students, all from poor families, were having their eyesight checked by VisionSpring, a nonprofit group.

Ratan Singh, 45, a sharecropper who recently got his first pair of reading glasses, said he could not imagine living without them now. He said his inability to see tiny pests on the stalks of his crop had led to decreasing yields. He sheepishly recalled the time he sprayed the wrong insecticide because he couldn’t read the label.

“I was always asking other people to help me read but I was becoming a burden,” he said.

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Last month, after he accidentally broke his glasses, Singh, who supports his wife and six daughters, did not hesitate to fork out the 60 rupees, roughly 90 cents, for a new pair.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

ANDREW JACOBS © 2018 The New York Times

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