Seeing the Bigger Picture: Turning Eye Care into an Economic Growth Story
More than 1.1 billion people worldwide can’t see clearly. Glasses, the primary solution for this crisis are proven and inexpensive. Yet despite vision being essential to daily life, eyecare receives just 0.2% of global health aid. The Seva Foundation approached Mettalytics to build the economic case for investment.
1.1 billion
live with avoidable sight loss
We soon realised health ministries - the main focus of eye health advocacy - weren’t the right audience. To them, vision impairment simply wasn’t a top health priority.
Instead, we reframed our analysis to focus on workforce productivity, targeting decision-makers who cared about economic growth.
$1 trillion
in lost productivity annually from sight loss
To demonstrate this, we conducted the first systematic review of the non-health benefits of eye care. Working with researchers from Johns Hopkins University, the University of California, and the largest eye health hospitals in India, we calculated the costs and social benefits of delivering eye care in 20 case studies.
We uncovered a remarkable finding.
Listen to the story of how we did this research:
$36 in benefits for every $1 invested
Eye care ranked as one of the best uses of resources in global health. Not when focusing on health impacts, but when we flipped the narrative to consider its impacts on how people live, work and learn.
The report was covered by the Center for Global Development and published in the WHO’s flagship journal, Bulletin of the WHO. This demonstrates how the right economic case, told to the right audience, can change the trajectory of an entire sector.
