Taking Bold Steps to Tackle Avoidable Blindness in Africa

In March 2025, during a visit to a Cure Blindness Project-supported surgical camp in Arba Minch, Ethiopia, I met John*, a 15-year-old who had lost his vision to bilateral cataracts three years ago. Unable to attend school or move independently, John’s dreams were fading. Without sight, he believed his life would never improve.

Cure Blindness Project with partners changed that.

Screened by community health workers, referred to a primary hospital, and transported 150 km for surgery, John’s story reflects the hope Cure Blindness Project brings. In Africa, eight in ten blind individuals suffer from the avoidable (and treatable) conditions with cataract and refractive error being the most common causes.

Our work in Africa spans across 20 African nations where Cure Blindness Project supports partners to deliver more than 100,000 surgeries annually. Through collaborations with governments, NGOs, health facilities, and ophthalmology societies, we enhance training quality, expand surgical access, and empower community health workers to diagnose and treat conditions that lead to blindness.

As Cure Blindness Project celebrates our 30th anniversary, we continue to refine our 5-year (2023-28) strategic plan, prioritizing quality, sustainability, comprehensive care, and partnerships. We stay true to our founding mission to enable countries to cure avoidable blindness by developing high-quality, cost-effective eye care.

Quality is central, with forthcoming WHO quality standards for cataract surgeries, continuous improvement of frameworks, and strengthened African ophthalmic training opportunities. Quality will be
embedded across all support provided to partners including building the capacity of African institutions to deliver quality ophthalmic trainings that are comparable to the rest the world. Through equipment support, developing structures to improve faculty capacity, curriculum refinement and strengthening subspecialty training on the continent, quality will be built into each step of the care continuum. To support quality improvement for cataract surgeries, Cure Blindness Project is building capacity to support the adoption of standard operating procedures across all outreaches and the continuous quality improvement framework across our partners.

Local leadership and ownership are key to sustainability. Cure Blindness Project is advocating sustainable mechanisms for eye health care financing as part of the push for universal healthcare. Pooling of resources, ring-fencing of resources generated by eye health units within facilities and enabling domestic resource mobilization will be a critical part of the interventions. On the private sector front, private hospitals will be supported to develop sliding payment scales that will enable them to have a positive return on investment as they serve the people at the bottom of the pyramid. A partner assessment will inform progress towards sustainability and the levels of support provided by Cure Blindness Project.

A referral framework is vital to provide comprehensive care. Cure Blindness Project will pilot a referral framework in Ghana and Ethiopia with plans to scale up in other countries on the continent. Integration of cataract and trachoma trichiasis surgeries is already happening in South Sudan and Tanzania. In Ethiopia, integration of reading glasses for refractive error correction at outreach camps is underway and will be scaled up in other countries in the next three years to become standard practice.

A recent study in Nepal and India demonstrated a high return on investment in primary care services for eye health. Cure Blindness Project will invest in the training of frontline eye health providers including community health extension workers that have a huge reach within communities. Through this intervention, the burden on tertiary care will be reduced, freeing up the highly skilled healthcare workers to focus their energy where their skills have the highest impact.

Cure Blindness Project values the power of partnerships to address the mountain of eye health diseases including the need for addressing the backlog of cataract surgeries. Across Africa, it is common for a child to wait six months between a diagnosis and  a sight-restoring surgery. This is unacceptable.

I call upon governments, the private sector, and all stakeholders to join Cure Blindness Project in investing in eye health. Eye health is not only a social and human rights issue but also an economic issue with a high return on investment.

I would love to hear from you on how we can partner to reduce the burden of avoidable blindness in Africa. Please reach out at the address below.

Oliver Furechi
Associate Vice President for Africa
[email protected]

*not his real name