How can we reach scale?

Dr Andrew Cooper, our Chief Executive, on the first Eye Health Accelerator Grants

By Dr Andrew Cooper

The Vision Catalyst Fund was established with an ambitious goal to scale up access to eye health services across lower- and middle-income countries. Our newly published portfolio of four Eye Health Accelerator Grants is one crucial way in which we can work towards our objectives. 

Eye health organisations have worked hard for many years to provide access to vision. With growing and ageing populations, the global challenge is to scale up services to meet the needs of local communities. 

Our latest grants have all been made with this challenge in mind, taking calculated risks to find pathways to scale. By giving grants to a diverse set of organisations, we will generate evidence as to what works in different contexts, finding new ways to ensure that communities have access to eyeglasses and treatments for other eye conditions. 

All of the partners we are giving grants to (CHAI, the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, RestoringVision and Vision Spring) are testing out new ways to achieve a step change in eye health services. They are doing this through diverse approaches, such as through child health provision, new forms of collaboration and by building in eye health to government systems. 

Scaling up access to eye health will require a combination of new approaches, significantly more resources and, to some extent, a creative or entrepreneurial mindset. For example, how can we build eye health services into national education systems or link them to those tackling employment to build vision into their work? 

We certainly don’t claim to have all the answers, but with our grants, we are proud to support a range of programmes that are each forging a pathway to scale. We are looking forward to seeing how each programme progresses, learning along the way and changing the lives of millions of people. 

Whilst we do this, we continue to advocate for more resources to be allocated to eye health so that the gift of vision can be given to hundreds of millions of people through hard working partners and communities such as those we are proud to support in our first round of Eye Health Accelerator Grants. 

A primary healthcare worker checks the eyes of a newborn baby in a rural clinic in Tanzania. Photo courtesy of Dr Aeesha Malik from London Centre for Eye Health at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.