The following story was written by Khanindra Kalita, VisionSpring Sales Manager in India.

Ms. Sumana was born in pre-independence India in the erstwhile Nizam’s estate (Hyderabad), Daughter of Dr. Burgula Rama Krishna Rao, statesman and the first Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh; Ms. Sumana taught Social Science at the Atomic Energy Central School, Hyderabad for 30 years. Retired in 1998, Ms. Sumana moved to her native village and since then has been tirelessly helping poor communities of her village lead better lives.

A VisionSpring Champion, Ms. Sumana helped VisionSpring’s Vision Entrepreneurs’ conduct eye camps in her village on many occasions. According to Ms. Sumana, an understanding of human nature and society is essential for organic development and the well being of society. A firm believer of ‘Work is Worship’ and ‘Service to Humanity is Service to God’, she believes in the concept of a pluralistic society with equal emphasis to human values.

Dr. Alok Agarwal, a leading Nephrologist based out of USA and Ms. Sumana’s former student says that his teacher has been his greatest inspiration and takes pride in being able to provide financial assistance to a Public School in Ms. Sumana’s native village.

Inspired by learning about VisionSpring’s work in Burgula village during his recent visit to her, Dr. Agarwal requested VisionSpring Vision Entrepreneurs to conduct an eye camp in August, 2010 to coincide with the opening ceremony of an auditorium donated by him for the for the local Self Help Group (SHG). Ms. Sumana made door-to-door visits and encouraged the villagers, especially women, to participate in the camp.

VisionSpring Vision Entrepreneurs’ screened 190 women and men and sold 106 eye glasses. During the camp, Dr. Agarwal actively participated and provided part financial support for purchase of eye glasses to the needy people.

Thanks to the support of Ms. Sumana, VisionSpring conducted 4 eye camps in Burgula village in last two years, screened 560 people, sold 230 eye glasses and helped 60 cataract patients get operated at the Lions Eye Hospital in Mahabubnagar city.

A person like Ms. Sumana in every village can do wonders by taking VisionSpring’s message to her neighbors and helping them achieve their goals. Apart from being encouraging and inspiring, the efforts of individuals like Ms. Sumana will help VisionSpring create a Factorial Effect* in impacting the lives of many.

To read more stories like this, visit our Stories from the Field page or Donate now to help VisionSpring to reach more villages like Ms. Sumana’s.

*In mathematics, the Factorial of a positive integer n, denoted by n! is the product of all positive integers less than or equal to n. For example, 5! = 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1

VisionSpring is pleased to announce the appointment of Pritpal Marjara as Regional Director for Asia.

Based in New Delhi, Mr. Marjara will be responsible for leading VisionSpring’s team in India and collaborating with our partner, BRAC, in Bangladesh. Mr. Marjara will be instrumental in helping to drive VisionSpring’s success as it works to reduce poverty and generate opportunity in the developing world through the sale of affordable eyeglasses.

Mr. Marjara brings nearly 15 years of diverse professional experience in social marketing, behavior change communication, research and Information Technology. He joins VisionSpring from Marie Stopes International (MSI), a world leader in providing family planning service, where he worked with the global marketing team to increase access and demand for family planning products and services through the use of technology. Before his work with MSI, Mr. Marjara worked with the National AIDS Control Organization, within the Indian Ministry of Health & Family Welfare. In this capacity, he formed and directed an autonomous unit which provided strategic guidance to the Indian Government’s integrated condom marketing programs across much of India.

Mr. Marjara has also worked with Population Services International (PSI) in India including leading PSI’s successful Avahan Project supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The author of numerous research papers utilizing his social marketing expertise, Mr. Marjara began his career as an IT professional developing software programs, which included a two year assignment in the Czech Republic.

Pritpal will officially join the VisionSpring office in New Delhi on September 15th. The VisionSpring global team is delighted to welcome Pritpal on board. Welcome, Pritpal!

Norris and VisionSpring customers in India

VisionSpring sent Leah Norris, undergraduate student at Bard College, to India to gather stories and insights from our customers, Vision Entrepreneurs and staff. In the following post, Norris reflects on hospitality, dignity and her changing perspective in India.

Though I had traveled before, I had never been traveling with a purpose like I was when VisionSpring sent me off to Hyderabad, India.  I sat on tiny planes, crowded overnight trains, cars battered by the chaotic and threatening traffic, buses that broke down amongst empty fields, and fragile rickshaws to get from village to village, interviewing customers and employees of the company.  One man who was previously making a dangerously low income proudly showed me the house that he had built for his family since he began working as a Vision Entrepreneur. It was the single solid cement house in the area, surrounded by semi-temporary shacks that demonstrated the incredible contrast between his former life and the new one he had been given the opportunity to make. Another man, a weaver whose efficiency was doubled by the pair of glasses that VisonSpring made available to him, spent a full day’s wages buying my coworkers and me sodas in overflowing appreciation and hospitality. This kind of gratitude was extraordinarily hard for me to accept – I wanted nothing more than to run back and give him a thousand sodas in return- but the feeling of independence that he could now afford and express by welcoming us into his home was something he had fought for.

Throughout, I was inspired by the way that motivated individuals in challenging circumstances prioritize. The man with the cement house focused on making his family secure and comfortable, and feeling like he had accomplished something significant. The man with the sodas focused on his ability to interact with warm reciprocity, something that should be a human right, should we choose to exercise it. I met a father who still had not bought himself a cot to sleep on with his VisonSpring income for the sake of sending his son to the best possible school. What these people did when given the possibility for financial empowerment was a striking testament to this impressionable undergrad, teetering on the brink of cynicism. I saw a lot of terrible, frustrating things in India, but I also saw startlingly bright colors, a textured and poignant culture, and the reason that it is vital to give people a chance to create something for themselves. Even a simple pair of eyeglasses can be the spark that ignites the momentum.

VisionSpring India partner, Villgro Fellow 2010, Jeanne Chen argued in a recent blog post that a gender gap exists in the adoption of technologies at the base of they pyramid. She suggested that according to her observations, VisionSpring’s customers are skewed in favor of men because women lack disposable income and find glasses aesthetically unappealing.

VisionSpring is grateful to our important partner, Villgro for working on our behalf and ensuring women and men adopt our products equally. It is through such partnerships that we continue to improve our operating model and spread our impact. We welcome the questions like those raised by Jeanne Chen so that we can continue to innovate both our products and services to better serve consumers at the Base of the Pyramid.

In her post, Chen asserts that social enterprises need to be conscientious of the gender gap in innovation adoption and evaluate the impact of their interventions to overcome this gap – we agree. VisionSpring trains our Vision Entrepreneurs to conduct screenings and provide eye care solutions to all genders. According to our sales records in India last year, VisionSpring customers were roughly 52% male and 48% female – only slightly in favor of men. Despite this statistic, Chen raises two critical issues for VisionSpring to consider.

First, Chen argues that women are less likely to wear glasses because they consider eyeglasses aesthetically unappealing. To address this, she recommends including women in the sourcing of glasses. As a market-driven organization, VisionSpring recognizes the importance of understanding the needs and desires of all intended users of our products, including women. We have learned that by listening to the consumer we have a higher adoption and usage rate of the product. For this reason, VisionSpring utilizes our Visions Entrepreneurs to gather feedback regarding frame styles and selection and the sales of our products reinforce what works for our customers. VisionSpring local staff collect this information and use it to make sourcing decisions. For example, VisionSpring created protector glasses, which are sunglasses with clear, UV protected lens, specifically to address the cultural preferences of some women to avoid shading their eyes. Though we are not perfect, like other consumer businesses, VisionSpring does its best to accommodate the widely varied tastes of our customers.

Second, Chen notes that women are less likely to have disposable income and economic means to purchase glasses. As she recommends, our Vision Entrepreneurs emphasize to customers the importance of preserving vision for economic productivity. Part of the challenge of selling this product is demonstrating to customers that purchasing reading glasses is an important investment for economic wellbeing of the family unit. One of our primary goals is to increase awareness about vision loss in the developing world and a large part of our outreach is done through vision campaigns in which our Vision Entrepreneurs not only screen vision loss, but also educate the general population about how restoring their vision can restore their productivity.

One customer in rural India, Shadna had been supporting her family for years after her husband died. As her vision deteriorated, she was unable to continue her work as a seamstress and had to labor in the fields earning too little to support her family. She tells VisionSpring, “I heard that a Vision Entrepreneur would be in my town, and even though I did not have money to spare, I went because the vision screening was free. I saw that the glasses they had were good quality, and I decided that they were worth the cost. I am back to my sewing now and making the same money as before. I am happy that I once again have a way to support my children.”

Stories like Shadna’s reinforce the power of awareness of our services and of vision care to women and men in the community. We thank Jeanne Chen and Villgro for holding us accountable to ensuring women are able to adopt the important technologies they need. We look forward to strengthening our collaboration on behalf of all consumers at the Base of the Pyramid.

VisionSpring was highlighted on the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric last night!

The CBS Evening News team traveled to Rajasthan to learn the moving story of Ranju Sharma, whose work as a Vision Entrepreneur was so well respected that she was the first woman ever nominated to run for village chief.

Watch our powerful three minute CBS Evening News segment, “Eyesight for Sore Eyes”!

With support from the Rockefeller Foundation, VisionSpring had the opportunity to partner with the design firm IDEO to develop a model for integrating eye care for children into our existing work in India. Anitha Gopalan, Sales Innovations Manager for VisionSpring India, reflects on the experience.

When our team was called to design an approach for our Vision Entrepreneurs to screen and sell eyeglasses for children, a completely new model for rural India and for VisionSpring, we knew we would need to take an innovative approach in order to listen to the market and ensure we design a program that really works. We reached out to IDEO, pioneers of Human Centered Design, and were lucky enough to have Jocelyn Wyatt and Sandy Speicher conduct workshops and training sessions centered on this challenge.

IDEO provided us us valuable insight on the processes behind ideation and prototyping. With their help, we conducted field research and identified key barriers to the challenge of empowering our Vision Entrepreneurs to screen children for eye conditions. Some of the results of our research were unexpected; for example, we learned early on that kids are afraid to reveal their imperfections. Through the design process, we came up with innovative ways to help kids overcome their fear and embarrassment, such as having children practice screening other children and putting up pictures of movie stars who wear glasses on the walls. We found that these tools helped children feel empowered in the screening process, as well as helped to destigmatize eye problems.

We also learned that children can be a major lever in providing eye care to families. This is a lesson that had already been learned in relation to other health care issues; for example, parents we interviewed explained that many of them learned to boil water from their children, who learned about the benefits of this in school. Thanks to the success of campaigns such as these, many parents now look to their children for guidance on basic health and hygiene issues. We believe that if we can educate children about eye care and empower them to get their own eyes screened, we may well be able to access their parents as well. These insights proved to us that, while we still have a ways to go in designing our model, we are well on our way to establishing a new model for effectively serving children in need while strengthening our overall sales.

Thanks to our work with Jocelyn and Sandy, as well as our past work with Acumen Fund Fellow and IDEO employee John Tucker, we have come a long way with our innovations processes. In the last year, we have tested and successfully launched a line of photochromic glasses. We also designed a flip chart for our Vision Entrepreneurs to standardize our communication and win credibility in C-Towns (mid-size rural cities in India). We are excited about our ability to continue replicating the Human Centered Design process to create and bring to scale new approaches to providing eye care in the developing world.

VisionSpring received this email from a supporter in India, who shares his perspective on why the VisionSpring model is so important for the rural poor.

I live in Chennai, India. I would like to congratulate you for your noble efforts. I can afford medical care, and know the importance of using reading glasses.

Most eye doctors collude with shops that sell glasses and make people pay atleast Rs. 1000 each year for their glasses. Glasses that should normally cost Rs. 100 to 200 cost 10 times that price. In cities, most eye doctors prescribe “progressive lenses” which cost anywhere between Rs. 5000 and Rs. 20000. City folks who work in Information Technology can afford these.

I know many poor people in my native rural village who simply cannot afford to buy reading glasses paying Rs. 1000 or 2000 every year, and therefore choose not to read after 40. The quality of their lives come down drastically and people go into a semi-retirement at about 45 years. Your efforts in addressing this segment of population is laudable.

I was told that VisionSpring used to sell reading glasses through Apollo Pharmacies in Andhra Pradesh (India), but not any more.*

The model adopted by you to sell glasses through medical shops (pharmacies) is wonderful, and I hope you’ll revive that model.

As a person coming from a rural village, I know that more than 50% of the people do not have money to even pay a doctor and therefore rely on medical shops to treat them. Poor people are therefore likely to buy their reading glasses if sold through medical shops.

I hope you’ll revive selling your reading glasses through Apollo pharmacies or other agencies again.

* Note: As Venkatarathnam mentions, there is a market failure for low-cost glasses even in urban centers in India, and in other developing countries where VisionSpring works. VisionSpring has begun to address this issue in India by making glasses available through Apollo Pharmacies on a trial basis. This effort has not ended, as he had heard, but at the moment remains a small trial program. VisionSpring plans to develop and expand this delivery model in 2009.

BRAC, the largest non-profit organization in the developing world, is a dream partner for a small organization. But landing the partnership is only the first part. What happens next is where it gets interesting…our Franchise Partner Manager Lalit Kumar reports from the field.

We often joke here at VisionSpring that working with BRAC is like landing a contract with Walmart. It’s the kind of opportunity that every small NGO dreams of – BRAC is known for its massive scale and incredible efficiency. This partnership will allow us to reach a huge new market of people in need in a time frame that would have previously been impossible. Now we just have to deliver!

We’ve been working with BRAC for two years now. For the last six months, we’ve been selling about 500 glasses per month by empowering BRAC’s network of Shashto Shebikas (community health volunteers) to sell our eyeglasses. Now, with our new plan to scale up, we will provide affordable glasses to almost ten million people in Bangladesh over the next three years.

Our biggest challenge by far is managing the inventory that BRAC needs. At the moment, we’re delivering about 30,000 pairs of glasses every four months, but soon we will need to deliver 30,000 every month. We are mainly focused on getting the glasses into Bangladesh, a complicated process involving multiple inspection agencies. A 2006 Doing Business (http://www.doingbusiness.org) report from the World Bank notes that when a Bangladeshi company imports goods, it has to prepare 16 types of documents and obtain 38 signatures, and that the whole process takes 57 days. I can tell from our experience that it hasn’t improve much in the last few years.

For example, we received a Letter of Credit from a bank in Bangladesh that was valid only from April through June. Simply getting it updated meant that we had to get signatures from BRAC’s bank in Bangladesh, VisionSpring’s bank in New York, VisionSpring’s offices in India and New York, and our vendor and inspection agency in China.

We at VisionSpring are working hard to understand the whole process and constantly improve our delivery time. The first order took us more than 9 months to clear customs and make it in to Bangladesh, and the next order took about 6 months. Our goal is to get the process down to 3 months, which we are able to achieve in other developing countries where we work. We are certainly going through a period of adaptation, but it has been a very exciting time and I look forward to making more leaps of improvement.

After business school at the Institute of Rural Management Anand (IRMA), I was surprised to find that the challenges we face are the same as private sector businesses, only we are addressing them in some of the most challenging markets in the world. There is a reason that most private-sector companies haven’t tried to reach rural markets in Bangladesh; the start-up and logistics costs are simply too high. However, if our partnership with BRAC is successful, we will be able to provide affordable glasses and business opportunity to millions of people in Bangladesh. For us, it is well worth the struggle.

Microfranchising at the Base of the Pyramid: David Lehr’s paper provides an in-depth analysis of microfranchising as a development tool. The paper highlights three leading microfranchising organizations that partner with Acumen Fund: Drishtee, VisionSpring (formerly Scojo Foundation) and Sustainable Healthcare Foundation. It’s one of a series of written articles that Acumen Fund has produced about the ways market-based approaches are changing the way we think about poverty alleviation.

Read the paper here: http://www.acumenfund.org/uploads/assets/documents/Microfranchising_Working%20Paper_XoYB6sZ5.pdf

This post originally appeared on the Acumen Fund Blog http://blog.acumenfund.org/2008/11/10/new-on-acumenfundorg-ambulances-clinics-and-microfranchises/

The following is a post from Tim Johnson-Aramaki, a student at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, who spent the summer with VisionSpring India working on a data-collection methodology to measure the long-term impact of VisionSpring’s work on the lives of Vision Entrepreneurs and customers. His project is part of a multi-year impact study conducted by Professor Ted London at Michigan’s William Davidson Institute.

“Over the last few months, I’ve been working to develop a survey instrument with the VisionSpring team here in Hyderabad and the William Davidson Institute team in Ann Arbor. The first step was survey pre-testing, which involved conducting countless interviews in rural village throughout the state of Andhra Pradesh. These interviews are meant to help us discover whether the questions we’ve come up with are understood by respondents with varying semantic and cultural backgrounds, and if they prompt valid and appropriate responses. Some of the results we’ve gathered have been really interesting.

For example, one of the most critical pieces of data in measuring VisionSpring’s impact is the income of its Vision Entrepreneurs and customers. It also happens to be one of the most difficult things to measure as there are challenges when it comes to discussing money. Through our interviews, we’ve found that while people are relatively open in assigning a number to their income, that number may not be accurate. There are a variety of reasons for this, but one is that they fear the income figures may be passed on to state or national agencies, potentially jeopardizing the public assistance they receive. To avoid this, they often provide income figures lower than that which they actually earn.

Responses can also be skewed because interviewees seem to identify the interviewer as higher up on the social ladder. With that in mind, the interviewees often attempt to please the interviewer with superlatively positive answers about product or service quality and refuse to make any constructive criticism. Moreover, in areas of the survey that allow for subjective self-measurement, many interviewees have attempted to “impress” the interviewer with potentially inflated responses. For example, we had to alter an entire section that measured an individual’s self-assessed capacity in tasks such as interpersonal communication because nearly all the responses to these questions were either a four (“agree”) or five (“strongly agree”). There would have been no improvement to measure!

Working through these issues to get an effective impact-assessment tool for the base of the pyramid has been challenging but rewarding. What’s so great about this project is that while it’s being made for and by VisionSpring, ultimately the survey and survey-development practices developed here in Hyderabad could really benefit other organizations working at the base of the pyramid in helping them measure the success of their work.”