Breaking the Cycle: How Place-Based Alternative Finance Can Clear the Path to Vision

Around the world, Aid budgets are being cut, and pressing global issues are becoming harder to finance. We must break the cycle and begin to find domestic solutions to create sustainable change.

In this fireside chat session, Andrew Bastawrous, Co-Founder and CEO of Peek Vision and Simon Arunga, Founding Chairman, Dr Arunga’s Eye Hospital in Uganda, will take us on a journey, inviting the audience to share their own experiences and challenges with uncertain funding. Andrew and Simon, both ophthalmologists and entrepreneurs, will explore the potential－and pitfalls－of a creative approach being trialed in Uganda that seeks to align patients, healthcare providers and financial mechanisms to enhance eye care delivery.

More than 1 billion people live with poor vision, holding back individuals, communities and countries. Andrew and Simon have dedicated their lives to solving this global problem. The reasons are clear. Good vision leads to better educational outcomes, increased productivity, higher income, better livelihoods, safer roads and enhanced wellbeing and quality of life. Despite simple solutions, the vast majority of people living with poor vision will not get the pair of glasses or five minute cataract operation that would return or improve their sight.

Over 100 million people in the Global South are in need of cataract surgery today. Current predictions are that 75 million of them will die vision impaired despite treatment being available.

The “market” for eye care for low income populations remains largely a philanthropic effort with limited government expenditure on eye care, thus limiting the scale of services to the amount of philanthropic resources available. Cataract surgery in high-volume eye units costs as little as $50. After surgery, an individual or household’s monthly income increases by $10-40. Yet, many who stand to have a substantial uplift in income do not have the resources available to unlock this change. Thus, the issue could be framed as a cash flow problem.

Dr Arunga’s, currently comprising two hospitals, provides comprehensive quality eye care services to the people of Uganda. Peek Vision is a social enterprise that powers eye health programme providers to strengthen systems and service delivery with a software and data intelligence platform. With Peek, eye health providers such as Dr Arunga’s Eye Hospital can identify and address gaps and inequalities in their services.

Peek Vision and Dr. Arunga’s Eye Hospital are working together to test innovative financing models to try to unblock the cash flow problem, focusing on providing financial assistance so that patients who couldn’t otherwise afford cataract surgery now can. During the session, Andrew and Simon will share hypotheses that this partnership is testing and what has been learned so far. They will invite the audience to share their own experiences and perspectives, contributing to the broader conversation about the direction of this initiative. Finally, they will prompt the audience to think about whether this model could work beyond eye care.