With 40 million people across the world suffering with blindness, cataracts are the leading cause. People that are diagnosed with cataracts amount to half of the globe’s blind population, with the majority coming from developing countries.
Cataract blindness can often cause severe economic and social repercussions. Women are often shunned from their families and deemed useless and many people are also completely unable to work due to their poor vision.
Only a small percentage of the 5 million people who develop cataracts each year receive treatment, because they live in communities where they cannot access or afford healthcare.
The mission of the Tej Kohli & Ruit Foundation is to combat this needless blindness is to allow those who normally wouldn't have access to be able to obtain treatment through direct interventions to rebuild people and communities.
The Tej Kohli & Ruit Foundation deploys outreach teams of ophthalmologists to perform high-volume cataract surgeries for free at surgical camps around the world.
Curing needless blindness costs as little as $50 per patient and takes just seven minutes. The ripple effect of curing blindness transforms the social and economic prospect of entire communities and nations for the better.
The Tej Kohli & Ruit Foundation is also training local technicians and documenting the social and economic impact of the cataract surgeries delivered in each region to support a longer-term goal of establishing a network of permanent community eye hospitals to prevent blindness.
The Tej Kohli & Ruit Foundation story is one of a unique partnership between ‘God of Sight’ Dr Sanduk Ruit and Mr Tej Kohli. Through their worldwide mission to cure blindness Tej Kohli and Dr Sanduk Ruit are curing blindness and leaving a legacy of community eye hospitals in the world’s poorest communities.
The Tej Kohli & Ruit Foundation is also taking microsurgical outreach camps to Nepal, India, Indonesia, Bhutan, Myanmar, Bangladesh, North Korea, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Tanzania, Lebanon and Syria.
ABOUT TEJ KOHLI
Tej Kohli is a London-based technologist and investor whose interests also include global real estate. He is the largest individual esports investor in Europe after committing €50m as part of a $100m total investment into Switzerland-based Rewired. Tej Kohli set up the Tej Kohli Foundation in 2005 after founding and then selling a series of companies clustered around online payment technologies.
Between 2015 and 2019 the Tej Kohli Cornea Institute in India welcomed 223,404 outpatients and delivered 43,255 surgical procedures for free. In 2019 Kohli donated $2m to support scientific breakthroughs at Mass Eye and Ear in Boston to fight blindness using new nanotechnology and DNA hybridization techniques.
Amongst its many projects the not-for-profit Tej Kohli Foundation has provided funding for a COVID-19 vaccine in the USA; has consistently operated free canteens to feed children in Costa Rica since 2005, and since 2019 the Tej Kohli Foundation has provided free bionic limbs to disabled teenagers in the United Kingdom.
ABOUT DR SANDUK RUIT
DR Sanduk Ruit is an ophthalmologist from Nepal who has restored the sight of over 130,000 people across Africa and Asia using small-incision cataract surgery. He is also one of the founders of the Tilganga Institute of Ophthalmology. For his work in taking quality, life-transforming cataract surgery to the world’s poorest people, he has been referred to as the "God of Sight".
In 1994, Ruit helped to found the Tilganga Institute of Ophthalmology, which provides free treatment to those who cannot afford to pay. It manufactures high-quality intraocular lenses for surgery at a fraction of the price of its previous manufacturing cost. The extremely low cost of these lenses has made quality cataract surgeries more affordable to the world’s poorest populations.
Ruit was awarded the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Award for Peace and International Understanding, considered to be the Asian equivalent of the Nobel Prize, for his work enabling the needlessly blind in the poorest countries to see again. In 2018, the Government of India awarded Ruit the Padma Shri, its fourth highest civilian award.
14 июл 2021