The Fred Hollows Foundation USA

Our long-term goal is to have a zero prevalence of avoidable blindness and vision impairment with an immediate focus on the gap between low- and high-income countries and between women and men.

The impact of restoring sight goes beyond treating blindness.

In research we’ve undertaken, we discovered that alleviating blindness is an effective way of easing poverty in the developing world. If more people in a nation can see, more people can go to school, work, raise children, or start businesses. Ending avoidable blindness improves the economy, equality, skills and development of a country, while reducing its financial and social burden.

Our founder's way was never to fly eye doctors into a country or hand out cash and walk away. The Foundation believes in partnerships with individuals, communities and governments.

Our aim, wherever we work, is to build capacity at all levels - from village health centres to regional hospitals to national ophthalmological networks. We train local doctors and health workers, build and upgrade facilities, develop and introduce new technology, and provide equipment.

Advocacy is another key part of our work. We lobby governments to change policies and improve health systems. All the different facets of our work are about achieving two things: providing long-term sustainable eye health care and ending avoidable blindness.

We have been tackling preventable blindness for over 25 years by training thousands of local eye health workers, including surgeons, nurses, and teachers.

Cataract is the leading cause of blindness globally - and an "intraocular lens" or IOL (a lens placed inside the eye) is an integral part of restoring sight to someone with cataract.

When our founder Fred Hollows was alive, IOLs were expensive – which meant that low-cost cataract surgery was considered an impossibility. However, Fred put the pieces in place to create state-of-the-art intraocular lens factories in Nepal and Eritrea. This reduced the cost of a cataract surgery in the 90s from $150 to $25 and made it affordable for people from the developing countries.

Trachoma is the leading infectious cause of blindness in the world today. As many as 229 million people live in areas where they are at risk of developing this crippling disease. To date, we have vaccinated over 19 million people to stop the blinding disease.

We are also at the frontline of research and innovation in eye health. Through the development of innovative new models of eye care financing and stat-of-the-art, low-cost technology, we have been providing the infrastructure and tools needed to effectively prevent and treat eye disease.

We are also using our position as a leading international development organization to put eye health on the global agenda. Working in partnership with like-minded organizations, we are using evidence-based research to affect sustainable change and challenge local governments to do more to ensure everyone can access high-quality care.

In 2019, we treated 24,799,013 with antibiotics for trachoma and distributed 124,409 pairs of glasses. We screened 4,250,931 people in 2019.

We also conducted just under 1 million eye operations and treatments including:
*133,148 cataract operations
*21,842 surgeries to treat trachoma
*10,832 diabetic retinopathy treatments
*481,013 other sight saving or improving interventions

In 2019 we trained 68,293 health workers, including community health workers, surgeons, clinic support staff and teachers. 2.3 million school children and community members were also educated in eye health and sanitation.

We also built or renovated 24 medical facilities and provided 4,677 medical facilities, training centers and schools with necessary equipment.

Our strategic goals include a fierce focus to eliminate the global backlog of cataract surgeries; to finally end trachoma; to make effective refractive error prevention and treatment accessible to all; and effectively manage diabetic retinopathy and other eye conditions.