Better Vision for the Poor

Several social enterprises are attempting to provide eyeglasses to the 500 million to 1 billion poor people in the world who need them. Some enterprises see the provision of trained optometrists as the key to solving the problem; others are focused on cost reduction; others still are focused on technological innovations. Why haven’t any of these approaches succeeded on a large scale?

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Estimates for the number of poor people worldwide who need eyeglasses are startling. The World Health Organization reports approximately 517 million people in developing countries are visually impaired because they do not have access to corrective treatment. The Centre for Vision in the Developing World at Oxford University has a higher estimate: More than 1 billion people need but do not get vision correction. There is a simple, old, and cost-effective technology to solve this problem— eyeglasses. Yet the problem persists on a vast scale. For the poor, eyeglasses often are either inaccessible or unaffordable, forcing hundreds of millions of people to live below their full potential.

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VisionSpring, founded in 2001 as a nonprofit dedicated to reducing poverty and generating opportunity in the developing world through the sale of affordable eyeglasses, uses a social entrepreneurship approach. In 2009, VisionSpring sold 201,000 pairs of readymade reading glasses. It is now trying to scale up its efforts and hopes to sell 1 million pairs of eyeglasses per year by 2012. Yet even if VisionSpring achieves this goal, the impact is too little, given that between 500 million and 1 billion people need eyeglasses—and the number is growing.
Another approach to solving the vision problem emphasizes technological innovation to provide low-cost, self-adjustable spectacles. These eyeglasses are called AdSpecs, and they are being developed by Joshua Silver, a physics professor at Oxford University. At least two other organizations are also offering adjustable spectacles, but none has achieved significant scale, probably because they are not cost-effective and have not gained customer acceptance from a style perspective.
If the benefits of eyeglasses are so obvious, why has it been so difficult to solve such an apparently easy social problem?