Watch the Video
Watch more Seva Videos
Our Work
Seva and Grameen
Dr. Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank, winners of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, are partnering with Seva to build a network of eye hospitals in Bangladesh
Sight Volunteers
If you're an ophthalmologist or other health professional, you may be interested in volunteering with Seva's Sight Programs
Sign-up for e-Updates!
Build Healthy Eye care Programs
Rather than building our own eye hospitals, independent of existing structures or sending short-term international doctors to provide services, Seva works in partnership with existing local programs and institutions, training them to provide quality care. This means our eye care services are effective and culturally appropriate. It also ensures that the work we begin will continue into the future.
Global Sight Initiative
Through the Global Sight Initiative, Seva builds collaboration among international eye care organizations in order to share knowledge, systems, and best practices in the field of eye care. We use lessons learned over Seva's 35 year history to improve the efficiency, effectiveness and sustainability of eye care institutions around the world. Through the Global Sight Initiative (a Clinton Global Initiative commitment) each center is increasing the productivity of other eye care institutions in their region of the world. Today nine training centers currently work with over 50 eye hospitals to increase training, productivity and hospital management resources.
Invest in Infrastructure and Equipment
In the remote places where Seva works, access to eye care may mean a multiple-day trip to reach a medical clinic. Many people, particularly those living in poverty, are unable to afford such a long journey. Seva helps to address this by bringing vision centers to local communities and increasing a hospital’s outreach capacity.
Eye care requires specialized equipment and facilities. Clinics and hospitals need operating theaters equipped with microscopes. They need appropriate surgical and exam rooms equipped with vision charts and refractive lenses. Seva provides essential supplies necessary to provide quality care. We work with hospital staff to ensure they know how to repair this equipment if it breaks, ensuring that services continue to reach those who need them most.
Train Future Leaders in Global Eye Health
Each year, Seva trains ophthalmologists, ophthalmic assistants, hospital administrators and community health workers. The success and sustainability of an eye care program relies on committed personnel trained in the knowledge and skills of how to provide quality eye services.
Economic Sustainability
Seva's proven model of sustainable development is based on a simple yet effective formula: those patients who can afford to pay for services subsidize the cost of the patients who cannot afford eye care services. Clinics invest the income collected from patients to pay staff salaries, operating costs, and are eventually able to fully sustain their own services, while still providing eye care to those most vulnerable in their communities.
i-Connect: Sharing the world's eye care knowledge
There are thousands of articles, training programs, planning tools and other documents that describe effective strategies for reducing blindness, but these resources are rarely accessible to the people who need them most. i-Connect brings together some of the world's top medical information system professionals, representatives from isolated eye hospital training centers, and search engine giant Google. i-Connect is designed to improve search skills, make more materials available via loan and online, and increase the overall use of knowledge to improve people's vision around the world.
Through a grant from the Elsevier Foundation, i-Connect has been able to expand to include a partnership with the Association of Vision Science Librarians (AVSL). This partnership enables resource librarians at eye hospitals in developing nations to work with seasoned vision science librarians on any issues their resource center is facing.
