NEW YORK: 95% of people in Sub-Saharan Africa who need glasses don’t own a pair, according to the Britain-based charity foundation Vision for a Nation.
Its founder, British philanthropist James Chen, says Rwanda — whose 11-million residents are served by 14 ophthalmologists — is just one nation where the need for the glasses is great, especially among schoolchildren.
“We expect that perhaps a million people in Rwanda will need some form of vision correction, and out of that probably 900,000 people will just need a simple reading glass, and we would be able to supply that,” he says of his company, Adlens, which manufactures two types of adjustable glasses based on technology developed at Oxford University.
The glasses, he says, are easy to use and offer a wide range of magnification.
“You have two lenses, [and] as they move against each other, the part of the eye you can see out the power changes with the two lenses moving against each other,” he says. “The other technology we have is the fluid-filled [lens], which is a chamber; on the one side you have a plastic kind of a sheet, and as you put in the fluid; which is a silicone oil, it changes the curvature of that and so that’s what’s changing the power.”
