Government
A cost-effective model with an outsized economic impact.
Vision Action Fund has a proven track record of embedding and scaling reading glasses programs within existing community health worker networks and other public health initiatives in partnership with our portfolio partners across Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, and Cambodia. As demand grows, private sector markets grow, boosting local economies.
Reading glasses don’t just change one life — they transform communities and economies.
Not being able to see has wide-ranging consequences on one’s life. Poor vision means tasks like threading a needle, picking tea leaves, and making correct change take longer, lowering productivity and income for hundreds of millions of workers.
We help eliminate the regulatory barriers that prevent governments and markets from enabling access.
In high-income countries, reading glasses can be found over the counter in supermarkets and pharmacies. In many low- and middle-income countries, outdated regulations prohibit the sale of glasses without a prescription. And with less than a single optometrist per million individuals in many countries, these prescriptions are in short supply.
Vision Action Fund works with governments to formally advance over-the-counter reader policy reform, integrate reading glasses into national health strategies, reduce or remove duties on life-changing reading glasses, and enable routine procurement through public channels.
How Vision Action Fund
works with the public sector.
We work with NGO partners supporting governments to distribute reading glasses through the channels already deeply embedded in communities: healthcare facilities, community health workers, post offices, and religious institutions,
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Nigeria
Vision Action Fund is supporting “JigiBola 2.0,” an initiative of the Nigerian president in partnership with Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) and the Nigerian Ministry of Health, to ensure primary health care workers are trained to screen patients and dispense free reading glasses to adults with near-vision impairment. JigiBola has already reached 1.3M people with free reading glasses across the country. Now, JigiBola is expanding into eight additional states to reach an additional ~1M people with glasses.
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Ethiopia
Vision Action Fund has supported Last Mile Health, in collaboration with the Ministry of Health, to embed eye health into the national program for community health workers. To date, approximately 17k community health workers across the country have already been trained to provide vision screening and near-vision glasses, more than 250k glasses have been distributed, and and over 60k have been referred for additional care.
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India
Vision Action Fund is supporting partners to distribute glasses through primary health facilities and community-based networks. India has one of the largest grassroots workforces in the world: 9M self-help groups representing 100M women, close to a million ASHAs, nearly 900k nurses and midwives, and around 200k community health centers. Our partners, including The/Nudge and CHAI, are on track to reach over three million people in the next three years.
A gateway to broader health services.
Across our interventions, we’ve seen that people come for reading glasses and leave connected to a broader range of health services. Rather than competing with health systems, reading glasses can strengthen them, creating a new entry point to care and driving demand for services people may not otherwise seek out.
Reading glasses can open the door to additional health information, screenings and referrals, from hypertension and diabetes to eye conditions such as cataracts and glaucoma.
Playbooks and Case Studies
