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.

Despite the global pandemic, The Fred Hollows Foundation worked with our partners more closely
than ever before to ensure people could access affordable, high-quality and safe eye care. In 2020, we treated 6.3 million people with antibiotics for trachoma and screened over 1.8 million people.

The Fred Hollows Foundation also:
*Performed 40,379 cataract operations
*Performed 9,112 surgeries to treat trachoma
*Provided 7,757 diabetic retinopathy treatments
*Distributed 58,613 pairs of glasses
*Performed 119,967 other sight saving or improving interventions

In 2020 we trained 15,358 health workers, including community health workers, surgeons, clinic support staff and teachers. Over 1 million school children and community members were also educated in eye health and sanitation.

We also built, renovated, or equipped 241 medical facilities, training centers and schools. In addition, globally, 43,846 items of medical equipment and consumables benefited 4,559 members of the public and health workers in the midst of the pandemic.

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.