Moving to new countries | #2030InSight
Following the success of the first year of the Tej Kohli and Ruit Foundation, the plans are underway to begin to move into more countries across Asia and Africa.
The past year saw over 15 thousand surgeries completed. This was a major success for everyone involved. It means that thosse living in remote and poor communities across Nepal have been given a second chance at life and were able to thrive and earn a living.
After being asked of his achievements in Nepal, Dr Ruit explained that it was his commitment to fight poverty by increasing the accessibility of healthcare across the globe. The amount of people cured in Nepal over the last year is extraordinary. With the goal of 300,000–500,000 people cured by 2026, it is clear that the team will certainly reach that, if not exceed it.
The next steps are to take this mission across several more counties such as Indonesia, Myanmar and Ethiopia. Placing intervention in these countries will ultimately give people a chance to escape poverty and support themselves and families.
Often when countries are struck by poverty, it can become a generation issue. Living in poor conditions cannot be improved by one individual, unless they have the power too.
Intervention doesn’t come easily in these communities, which is where and why we step in. Having the aid and resources implemented into the regions via the foundation allows for those to begin the steps to improving their own livelihood.
Our work already has displayed that intervention and curing avoidable blindness can and does reduce poverty in poor communities. Allowing people to work and earn money pushes families and communities to prosper.
It has already been shown that Dr Ruit’s innovative surgery has been adopted by doctors across the world. Two doctors from Thailand spoke to the team at an outreach camp and informed them that they have learnt great methods from Dr Ruit and they practice them on their patients with extraordinary results. The influence of what has been achieved is something that will become widespread across the world — changing eye heath and poverty for good.
With the year success over the last year, the stakes have become higher. The Tej Kohi and Ruit Foundition have raised the bar for ourselves and are constantly striving to do and achieve more. Our pledge still remains the same — to screen 1 million and cure up to 500,000 by 2026.
With this ambitious goal in mind, we are becoming increasingly optimistic that this goal will be reached.
The Tej Kohli & Ruit Foundation was founded in March 2021 by London philanthropist Tej Kolhi and Kathmandu ‘God of Sight’ Dr Sanduk Ruit. As of November 2022 the NGO had screened 170,022 patients and cured 22,663of blindness at 91 outreach camps in Nepal, Bhutan and Ghana. The Tej Kohli & Ruit Foundation is a restricted fund operating under the auspices of Prism The Gift Fund, registered UK charity number 1099682. The Foundation targets the #1 United Nations Sustainable Development Goal of reducing poverty by making large-scale surgical interventions to cure blindness at the grassroots in the developing world. All treatments are provided completely free, with 100% of the funding coming from Tej Kohli and the Kohli family.
