Foresight is 2020

Jan 5th, 2009 1:12 PM EST
By Josh Chernila, ONE Online Communities Coordinator

File this under the category “Why didn’t I think of that?”

British inventor Josh Silver has invented adjustable prescription eyeglasses which allow the wearer perfect vision without the need for an optometrist. He hopes to distribute over 1 billion pairs of his glasses to the developing world by the year 2020.

…to make a pair of glasses which, instead of requiring an optician, could be “tuned” by the wearer to correct his or her own vision? Might it be possible to bring affordable spectacles to millions who would never otherwise have them?

[...] Silver now feels he has the answer. The British inventor has embarked on a quest that is breathtakingly ambitious, but which he insists is achievable - to offer glasses to a billion of the world’s poorest people by 2020.

One of the great obstacles to world health is the dearth of qualified health care professionals and facilities. By circumventing the need for optometrists, universal distribution suddenly becomes possible and the ramifications for working lives can be truly transformational.

Silver calls his flash of insight a “tremendous glimpse of the obvious” - namely that opticians weren’t necessary to provide glasses. This is a crucial factor in the developing world where trained specialists are desperately in demand: in Britain there is one optometrist for every 4,500 people, in sub-Saharan Africa the ratio is 1:1,000,000.

The implications of bringing glasses within the reach of poor communities are enormous, says the scientist. Literacy rates improve hugely, fishermen are able to mend their nets, women to weave clothing. During an early field trial, funded by the British government, in Ghana, Silver met a man called Henry Adjei-Mensah, whose sight had deteriorated with age, as all human sight does, and who had been forced to retire as a tailor because he could no longer see to thread the needle of his sewing machine. “So he retires. He was about 35. He could have worked for at least another 20 years. We put these specs on him, and he smiled, and threaded his needle, and sped up with this sewing machine. He can work now. He can see.”

-Josh Chernilla

TAGS: ONE, Policy News