Rotary Palmgrove Eye Hospital · Indo Eye Care Foundation
Nearly twenty thousand people
have had their sight given back.
It is the largest thing this club does, and it has been running for the better part of two decades.
The morning
they could see.
- 01
The dark
Cataract accounts for roughly half of all blindness in the world. In Nigeria it takes people out of work, out of school, and out of the life of their own household. It is not a rare disease and it is not a mysterious one.
- 02
The camp
The club runs free eye camps across Lagos, Ogun, Kano, Kaduna, Adamawa and Enugu. People arrive before dawn and queue. Everyone is screened. Nobody is asked what they can pay.
- 03
The cut
Cataract surgery takes about twenty minutes. The work grew out of a partnership with the Rotary Eye Institute in Navsari, Gujarat, and became the Indo Eye Care Foundation. Seven cornea transplants followed, the first performed in West Africa.
- 04
The morning after
The bandage comes off the next morning. That moment has now happened close to twenty thousand times because a group of business people in Ilupeju decided it should.
- ~0sight-restoring surgeries
- 0eye camps
- 0cornea transplants, the first in West Africa
Nine camps, six states
The programme started in Ilupeju and has not stayed there. Each camp is free at the point of use, and nobody is asked what they can pay.
- 01
Lagos
Home state, and where the club meets.
- 02
Ogun
Joint work across the district boundary.
- 03
Kano
With the Rotary Club of Lagos Island, 2024-25.
- 04
Kaduna
Northern camps.
- 05
Adamawa
The furthest the programme has reached.
- 06
Enugu
South-east.
From camps to a hospital
Camps treat the people who reach them on the day. A hospital treats everyone, every week of the year.
The Indo Eye Care Foundation was created in 2007, growing out of a partnership with the Rotary Eye Institute in Navsari, Gujarat, a hospital that has performed free cataract surgery at scale for decades. The club has since run free eye camps in Lagos, Ogun, Kano, Kaduna, Adamawa and Enugu, and performed seven cornea transplants, the first carried out in West Africa.
The long-term plan is a permanent facility: a purpose-built eye hospital equipped for high-volume cataract work, with operating theatres capable of several thousand surgeries a year. Equipment has been donated toward it over the years: surgical microscopes, tonometers, slit lamps and the rest of the apparatus a working eye theatre needs.
Why cataract
Cataract is responsible for roughly half of all blindness worldwide. It is not rare, it is not mysterious, and it is not permanent. The operation takes about twenty minutes. What stands between a person and their sight is almost never medicine. It is whether anyone has arranged and paid for the surgeon to be there.
That is the entire proposition of this project.
One surgery. One person who can see again.
Giving to this club goes further here than almost anywhere else it could go.