An army of community health workers is roaming Bangladesh to help near-sighted adult citizens by dispensing reading glasses to give them back their eyesight, well-being, and capacity to earn a living.
More than 32,000 community health workers (CHWs) are now busy conducting basic vision tests and distributing reading glasses to adults suffering from presbyopia, an age-degenerative condition, across 61 districts. As of 2022, more than 2 million adults had been reached.
To tackle this health crisis, BRAC formed a partnership with VisionSpring in 2006 to ‘de-medicalize the delivery of an over-the-counter product that had been stuck in optical shops and eye hospitals,’ giving the CHWs the possibility to help firsthand the Bangladeshi suffering from this condition: one in five adults aged 35 to 40 – often the peak of productivity – suffers from presbyopia. By having regular access to the patients, CHWs can follow up on them, creating a bottom-up feedback chain that allows for improvements to be applied quickly to the project.
