Yesterday, I visited a vision camp run by Acumen Fund investee Scojo Foundation, about 50 miles outside of Hyderabad. I was joined by Vipin Sharma, who is the Operations and Partner Channel Manager at Scojo Foundation, India, and by Acumen Fund Fellow John Tucker. Scojo holds these camps regularly, as an opportunity for their vision entrepreneurs to educate people about reading glasses and sell them high-quality glasses that cost around 150 rupees (about $4).
Presbyopia – ageing-related reduced vision – typically affects people age 35 and older. It is estimated that in India alone, 20 million people are short-sighted. For people whose livelihood depends on good vision – tailors, weavers, and anybody reading or doing detailed work – a pair of Scojo glasses can pay for itself very quickly.
While many of the people coming to the camp have vision and eye problems, only a portion of them suffer from presbyopia. The rest receive referrals to ophthalmologists at local hospitals. For those suffering from short-sightedness, Scojo has an elegantly simple series of tests, first developed by the World Health Organization, to calculate someone’s prescription. In addition to the standard tests, illiterate customers are fitted with a pair of glasses and asked to thread a needle. Time and again, I watched as pride splashed a smile across Scojo customers’ faces as they got the needle through the thread. Talk about seeing is believing!
There was a particularly powerful moment when a customer at the camp showed us a paper prescription with his diagnosis from an ophthalmologist. The doctor offered the man a 400 rupee pair of glasses (more than twice the price of Scojo’s glasses). However, the Vision Camp prescription matched that of the ophthalmologist – a testament to the quality of a Scojo diagnosis. The man happily bought the Scojo glasses for 160 rupees, boasting to everyone around him about his high-quality, low-cost deal.
Watching Scojo vision entrepreneurs at work reminds me of loan officers at microfinance organizations. Part of the power of microfinance is that the most successful microfinance organizations know how to take large numbers of people (often women) from poor communities and train them to be successful loan officers. This provides an income-generating activity and also the opportunity to build a scaleable enterprise.
Scojo has this same opportunity with its Vision Entrepreneurs. One of the entrepreneurs at the camp, Ms. Rama Devi, has been selling close to 150 glasses a month, earning herself about 8,000 rupees ($200) and making an excellent livelihood while serving an unserved market with a needed product.
Figuring out the training and mentorship required to create more women like Rama Devi will be key for Scojo to scale. The question I kept asking myself was whether a pair of glasses – which, in the camp that I attended, takes about 20 minutes to sell – is any more complicated a product than a microloan. On the one hand, microloans are building on a tradition of informal group lending that has existed for decades. But, to me, eyeglasses do not seem any more or less complicated to explain to someone than a loan. Like many Acumen Fund investees, Scojo will continue to experiment and learn, and we are excited to be partnering with them as they grow. Cost-effective rural distribution is one of the key unanswered questions faced by many of our investees, so the lessons that Scojo learns could well inform the practices of many of the enterprises in our investment portfolio.
Editor’s note: For more information, read What Works: Scojo India Foundation, a full-length case study on the enterprise published by World Resources Institute.
How inspiring! How exactly was the Scojo vision program developed so that Scojo vision entrepreneurs are able to deliver just as accurate a diagnosis as an ophthalmologist?
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