Right To Sight

This month's charity is Right To Sight, a charity set up three years ago by an Irish eye surgeon with the stated goal of eradicating preventable blindness across the world.

Chief executive Simon Hampel explains:

"From a standing start at the beginning of 2007, the RTS projects have been going well and we are actively working with Aravind from Southern India (winners of the Gates Global Health Award in 2008) to engender change on the ground.  

"We are beginning to really help tackle needless blindness in Africa and also to generate real data to show how we are doing…it's quite exciting. I heard recently that our partner hospital in DR Congo, which was opened 16 months ago, is already doing the most operations in the whole of the country.  

"On the other side we have had a large amount of donations dry up owing to the financial climate (I reckon we lost €1.5m in the last few months against promises made).

"Rather than let all this turmoil get us down we've taken the bull by the horns and are now actively out in the market looking for new sources of funding.

"We're creating a marketing campaign around our story and have been lucky enough to get Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Colin Farrell, Padraig Harrington and Katie Humble to agree to become faces for Right to Sight in 2009.

"RTS is young, passionate and different.  We genuinely feel that we can make significant inroads towards our goal of eliminating needless blindness in developing countries.  

"All our focus is about raising the bar in the service delivery of eye care to the community through using and developing local resources. Having seen and understood the successful programmes that tackle this appalling problem in India we are determined to help create precedents and engender change in Africa.

"To that end we have now selected 10 clinics across Africa to act as these catalysts. Some of our projects are in difficult places like DR Congo, Rwanda and Ethiopia but they are working.  

"With the funding that we are raising now we aim to help these clinics become financially self-sustainable within the next two years, doing 5000 cataract surgeries and 50,000 patient visits in a year.

"Given that the current African average is no more than 350 operations per year we believe that in achieving these goals we will have been able to prove the model and will then look to scale up our activities to help the nearly 10 million Africans who suffer from this terrible affliction."

If you would like to make a donation to Right To Sight, click here.