{"id":14308,"date":"2016-05-31T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-05-30T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/directcoffee.net\/they-came-they-saw-they-learned-why-eyeglasses\/"},"modified":"2017-10-10T23:01:52","modified_gmt":"2017-10-10T21:01:52","slug":"they-came-they-saw-they-learned-why-eyeglasses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/directcoffee.net\/en\/they-came-they-saw-they-learned-why-eyeglasses\/","title":{"rendered":"They came, they saw, they learned – Why eyeglasses?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Can you read this sentence? Then you\u2019ve been pretty lucky. Either your eyes are functioning correctly \u2013 or you are wearing glasses.<\/p>\n

Go to a school in Ethiopia and look around: You won\u2019t find any pupils with eyeglasses. This is not because they have better eyes than anywhere else. “Some of our students cannot see the blackboard nor even read what their neighbors write in their books”<\/em>, says Wendmage Guta, the director and teacher of Bufeta Gibe School. These children would benefit strongly from wearing glasses. In the classes we saw in Ethiopia, the teaching method was mostly \u201cchalk and talk\u201d. Therefore reading is crucial to success.<\/p>\n

Providing vision screening and eyeglasses to school children is a very good means to promote development. This idea is also supported by scientific evidence. Economists Paul Glewwe, Albert Park and Meng Zhao studied the effect in China: \u201cProviding glasses raised learning by 30 to 50 percent.”<\/em> The improvement in test scores among students who accepted the glasses were equivalent to the same effect of 0.9 years of schooling \u2013 or put more simply: providing them with glasses is as effective as putting them through an additional year of schooling. But way cheaper, for sure.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why we set ourselves the goal to bring eyeglasses to Ethiopia.<\/p>\n

Unlike the researchers, we will only cover part of the costs (the material of the eyeglasses and the screening day). Because while talking about the idea, people in the country told us it\u2019s better to make the parents pay a little bit as well \u2013 so that they have an incentive to nudge their children to actually wear the glasses.<\/p>\n

As we\u2019re neither opticians nor ophthalmologists, we need partners for this project. And we found them when we went to Ethiopia in January:<\/p>\n