“I call it my second full-time job. It’s a job that pays me nothing, is all-consuming and yet gives me the greatest joy,” enthuses Dr James Muecke, the Adelaide ophthalmologist who has made it his mission to tackle world blindness.
Alongside his day job, James is co-founder and Chairman of Sight For All, the not-for-profit eye health care organisation that is putting sustainability at the heart of its business model.
In an economic climate that is putting immense pressure on charities, his hugely effective ‘teach a man to fish’ approach is enabling Sight For All to reach hundreds of thousands – and soon, millions – of patients by focusing on education and infrastructure as opposed to isolated monetary solutions.
Sight For All is an antidote to the ‘fly in, fly out’ mentality of many aid organisations that direct their resources into projects that ultimately are not viable in the long term. The long term is exactly where James is focusing.
I believe that Sight For All’s network of eye care specialists can not only reduce blindness but ultimately alleviate poverty and save lives in some of the poorest communities in the world,” he says.
The enormity of the task facing Sight For All is patently clear when you begin to address the numbers. Around the world, 285 million people are vision impaired due to eye disease or simply a lack of glasses, yet staggeringly, 80% of this is preventable or treatable.
A defining moment in James’ humanitarian career and a trajectory of Sight For All came in 2007, when he was in Myanmar studying the causes of childhood blindness. “Two thirds of the world’s blind children live in Asia. What our research uncovered, and which astonished me, was that in Myanmar the leading cause of blindness in children was measles. Thousands were losing their sight from an entirely preventable condition. Something had to be done.”
In 2010, Sight For All trained Myanmar’s first children’s eye specialist, Dr Than Htun Aung, and established the country’s first children’s eye unit. They flew Dr Aung to Adelaide, where he received intensive hands-on training over a 12-month period. He now treats more than 20,000 children in Myanmar every year.
“Children’s eye surgeries have increased 10-fold in the country, which shows the phenomenal umbrella effect of our training,” says James.
“But more importantly, the effects will continue and patient numbers will multiply exponentially.”
Indeed, Dr Aung has since trained a second paediatric ophthalmologist and is currently training two more, meaning that their colleagues in Myanmar are no longer dependent on outside sources – a “self-reliance” that James believes is paving the way to reducing childhood blindness across the region.
The efficiencies and costeffectiveness of training and equipping local eye care specialists and staff are proven, but Sight For All is still relatively unknown among potential donors. To complement one-off donations from the charity’s website, James devised an innovative funding model, ‘Vision 1000’, designed to engage a core group of individuals, family trusts and corporations.
Each invests at least $1,000 a year to fund sight-saving programs as part of an ongoing relationship that ensures the long-term viability of Sight For All. To realise its goals, the charity also relies on a dedicated network of ‘Visionaries’ – over 120 volunteer specialists who collectively donate more than 10,000 hours of their time each year.
Sure to bring a step-change in the charity’s profile within Australia this year, Sight for All recently received accreditation as a recognised international NGO from the Australian Government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT). A further testament to the determination and innovation at the heart of the organisation, James was awarded an Order of Australia and was also named Ernst Young’s Social Entrepreneur for Australia in 2015.
This year, Sight For All launched its Youth Ambassador Program. Again, with a focus on the long-term, the chosen ambassador Chris Pennington is on board until 2019, and his first activity is a challenging 8,000 km cycle – on a single-speed bike – between Steep Point in Western Australia and the Cape Byron Lighthouse.
The expedition is estimated to take three months and Chris hopes to raise $50,000, which will benefit Sight For All’s projects in Australia and across eight partner countries: Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, Lao, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Vietnam.
For Chris, as for James, tackling childhood blindness is top of the agenda. James explains, “1.4 million children globally are blind, and childhood blindness in developing countries has an unimaginable impact.
These children miss out on an education and are often ostracised from their families and communities. They are trapped in a cycle of poverty that ultimately contributes to the wider economic issues in the community. We want to change that.”
Find out more about Sight For All’s life changing work at www.sightforall.org.