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An eye exam at Children's Vision in Bolivia

As in love, there’s a human tendency towards blindness. With social projects it seems important to look at them periodically with a hard eye to verify they are doing what we imagine they are doing. As an example, in the case of the Children’s Vision Project in Bolivia, we had the onsite team make an unannounced visit to a school whose children we screened, examined and provided glasses for one year ago.

What we discovered was that of the 90 children we provided with glasses, 46 children or 51% were no longer wearing their glasses, and of that group,  33 or 72% had broken or lost them.

Wow! How disheartening! Less than half of the glasses we provided were still being used. This necessitated a complete rethinking of the program from scratch and asking of questions like:

• Does this double the cost for the same benefit of the program? If so, is it still a worthwhile program?
• Could the money funding this program be better spent elsewhere? Say providing additional open heart surgeries?
• Is there a way to improve the program?

After soliciting opinions from everyone involved and in particular the people in the field, it was decided to:

1. Use a stronger, better hinged frame at an added cost of $1.20 assuming that this will cut down on the breakage.
2. Provide a hard plastic case instead of a cloth case to better protect the glasses.
3. Increse the screening cut off of 20/40 to 20/60 on the assumption that the poorer a child’s sight is, the more difference the glasses will make and hence the more valued they will be.
4. Push harder for some financial participation from parents assuming they will then have more invested in the child wearing the glasses.

So we begin 2010 with a modified program. In January of 2011 we will again sample the usage of glasses provided early in 2010 and we’ll see what we see and make further modifications to the program if needed.

A happy ending! We stepped back, questioned, and wound up with a better program.

Isaac Goff
Children’s Vision Project

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