Our Delivery Partnerships

At The Fred Hollows Foundation, partnerships are the heart of our work. We work with local partners to deliver sight-saving eye care. Our partners, mostly local and national governments, are essential in making eye care accessible and sustainable.

Who are our delivery partners?

The Foundation believes that local communities, civil society, and government partners are best positioned to understand and address the rights, needs, and aspirations of their communities. Our delivery partners primarily include local, regional, and national governments, whose knowledge and capabilities we respect, recognise, and support to establish sustainable eye care services.

Working collaboratively with governments, the private sector, civil society, and international organisations is essential for creating the conditions and structural changes necessary for effective, people-centred, sustainable, long-term change. By harnessing the combined knowledge, skills, resources, and experience of our partners, we achieve greater impacts than we could working alone.

What do our partners deliver?

Our partners are integral to the success of our mission and the sustainability of any impacts. We support them to add or enhance eye health related activities within their existing strategies and priorities. They take on prominent roles in program management and delivery. As service providers, they perform crucial work such as surgeries, training, screenings, and research, supported by our funds, technical expertise and networks.

We work with our partners to uphold the highest standards in program and clinical quality, knowing that these activities can pose risks to people accessing services, to our brand and reputation, finances, and compliance with legal and regulatory frameworks. Together, we strive to deliver impactful eye health services and strengthen local systems, with the overarching goal of ending avoidable blindness.

Surgery and eye health interventions

Training

Integration of eye health into community health programs

Screenings

Sustainable financing of eye health

Insurance, medical procurement processes and hospital funding

Research and innovation

Community engagement

We help our partners excel

Here's how we strengthen our partners:

Capacity building

We tailor our support to strengthen our partners' diverse capabilities, including organisational aspects like compliance, safeguarding, finance management, leadership, governance, and project management. Our technical support focuses on health system strengthening and workforce development, enhancing eye health curriculums in collaboration with local and global academic and research organisations. We emphasise continuous quality improvement in cataract care, helping health facilities identify and implement clinical quality initiatives through online and peer-supported training programs.

Digital health and heath data management

We improve data quality to support evidence-based decision-making. We also assist our partners in using their Hospital Management Information System and collaborate with them to build a robust digital health system for more effective and efficient operations.

Equity and inclusion

We have a framework in place to ensure our work reaches all people no matter their gender, age, where they live, socio-economic status, ethnicity or if they are living with a disability. We provide the tools and support to ensure eye health service providers can reduce barriers to access and ensure no one is missed out.

Funding and equipment

We provide financial support and essential equipment to empower our partners. By supplying state-of-the-art technical facilities and resources, we help ensure that our partners can deliver high-quality eye care services efficiently and effectively.

Driving government policy and support

The Foundation aims to have governments take ownership and management of eye health service and invest the funding needed to end avoidable blindness. We align our initiatives with government agendas to ensure sustainability of outcomes and local ownership of programming. We engage governments to commit budget to eye health, shifting public attitudes through education, or amending policies and laws. We seek local government input on where we work and what we do. Where eye health is not a priority, we build national coalitions of eye health stakeholders to support the development of national Eye Health Plans owned by the Ministry of Health.

Our partnership principles

Our partnership principles are central to our engagement with partners. They help overcome challenges, continuing adaptive programming, strategic integration and building strong relationships.

Trust

Flexibility

Accountability

Mutual respect

Collaboration

Transparency

Learning

Commitments and shared goals

Advocacy impact

We take a coordinated and evidence-based approach to engage governments at the national level, international organisations, and decision-makers to achieve sustainable change. Here are some examples:

Kenya

The Foundation has collaborated with the Ophthalmic Services Unit, Council of Governors, and Health NGOs Network to push for more domestic investment in eye health. We've influenced laws that allow county hospitals to keep and use their revenue, which will strengthen public health systems, including eye care, once enacted by county assemblies.

Learn more

Rwanda

Our advocacy through health financing projects has improved support and funding for eye health at all levels. The Government of Rwanda's contribution to eye health spending increased from 29% in 2017/18 to 36% in 2020/21, boosting sustainability and local ownership.

Learn more

Tanzania

We are working to make the national health insurance system fairer, as it currently doesn't cover comprehensive eye care. Our key partner has engaged with officials, leading to pledges to address these insurance gaps for eye health.

Providing hope in sight

We helped our partners implement a sight-saving project in three provinces across Vietnam to screen and educate people about eye health. Provincial Eye Hospitals in Da Nang, Quang Nam and Tien Giang served as implementing partners, screening people’s eyes to detect some of the most common conditions causing vision impairment.

The Foundation supported provincial governments for over two years, focusing on cataract, diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma and refractive error, the project:

36,000

People screened

9,750

Referred for follow-up treatment

1,100

Vulnerable people supported

1,000,000+

Educated on eye health in local areas

“The great challenges are not really personal challenges: How much can I do? – The great challenges are what structures can I help set in place that will alter things?”

Fred Hollows

Our new Five-Year Strategy

Sight Simulator