One institution that links Ireland and Mozambique closely together is the Mozambican Eyecare Project. This is an Irish Aid-funded initiative involving partners from Lúrio University in Mozambique and the International Centre for Eyecare Education (ICEE), in collaboration with Dublin Institute of Technology and University of Ulster.
The project aims to provide a solution to the problem of avoidable blindness in developing nations by addressing the significant barrier of local human resource capacity development through optometric education.
“We want to educate and empower Africans to develop their own system by empowering them to train trainers,” explains Aoife Phelan, a research optometrist with the project..
The number of blind people will treble by the year 2020 if no additional resources become available. Over 90 per cent of the world’s blind live in developing nations, but in many cases this blindness can be easily treated or even avoided altogether.
“As we train Africans, we also help to address the public and to make them aware of this problem,” Phelan points out.
The urgency of projects like this becomes more and more important when one regards the impact that visual impairment can have on quality of life, particularly in the developing world.
Visual impairment brings profound economic disadvantage to individuals, families and societies. Ninety per cent of visually impaired children in low-income countries are deprived of education, resulting from a lack of early eye care intervention.
Moreover, the limited capacity to conduct research in epidemiology and public health in Africa constrains the development of appropriate, effective and sustainable eye care systems. In addition, the annual costs of global blindness and low vision will more than double to $110bn by 2020 without intervention, and the annual GDP loss in sub-Saharan countries will reach 0.5 per cent.
But happily, the efforts made by the Mozambican Eyecare Project seen to be already bearing some fruit.
The project, in conjunction with the ICEE, has organised the shipment of 30,000 glass lenses donated by Ultra Site opticians to Durban in neighbouring South Africa.
Three pallets with approximately 640kg of lenses are now on their way to Africa, where they are expected to change the lives of 15,000 people.
On top of that, the project is currently “establishing Moz-ambique’s first optometry school at Lúrio University in Nampula,” says Phelan. The project is also organising a charity to raise funds for its efforts, and anyone willing to contribute to make life easier for blind Mozambicans can help through donating money, equipment or time.
In addition, Phelan says the project is “looking for people who are willing to teach our staff Portuguese to better communicate” with the people on the ground.