Photo courtesy of VisionSpring

May 11, 2010 | While working in Latin America, optometrist Jordan Kassalow discovered a relationship between economic and medical need. For many people, the natural decline in vision that comes with age resulted in a catastrophic loss of income, both individually and communally. Kassalow founded VisionSpring to apply for-profit market techniques to building locally based solutions -- in this case, training local women to fit and sell eyeglasses.

Before founding VisionSpring, Kassalow was co-founder of Scojo New York. He started the Global Health Policy Program at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he served as an adjunct senior fellow from 1999 to 2004. He also has served as director of the onchocerciasis (river blindness) division at Helen Keller International. Kassalow received a master’s degree in public health from Johns Hopkins University and his doctorate of optometry from the New England College of Optometry. He recently received the Award for Enterprising Social Innovation from the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business.

Kassalow spoke to Faith & Leadership about why it’s important to empower people to solve their own problems through market-based strategies. The following is an edited transcript.

Q: People in the United States would be shocked to realize how much can depend upon a pair of reading glasses they can get for $5 at Costco. How did you become aware of this need in other countries?

By training I’m an eye doctor and I’ve been fortunate to work in over 40 countries. Through the early years I was working on blinding disorders like river blindness and cataract blindness.

For every person that came in with a blinding disorder, there were 30 to 50 people coming to us because they were losing their ability to work. Many people in their early to mid-40s lose the ability to focus up close. In the developing world, people earn a living with their eyes and hands as weavers, tailors, mechanics, goldsmiths and so forth. As vision fades, their ability to do quality work [diminishes]. That leads to loss of productivity and loss of livelihood. At one time they were the masters of their craft. They were the economic center of their community, supporting children on one side and elderly parents on the other.

Once I framed it as an economic problem, it rose up as more urgent than if you just think of it as presbyopia, the inability to focus up close. If you look at it only from a health perspective, there are hundreds of health problems that are going to be more important. Showing that people are losing economic productivity makes it an urgent issue.

Q: Your material says you can buy a Coke in rural Guatemala more easily than you can buy a pair of glasses.

Absolutely. And for a lot less money. Research we’ve done in the field indicates that there are about 400 million people who have presbyopia but don’t have access to eyeglasses. It is a classic market failure.

Q: How did you get from recognizing the need to doing something about it?

To do something about a problem you have to figure out a solution. The market was failing because there was no natural distribution system into these communities. My idea was to create our own distribution system by training local ladies, who often didn’t have access to any capital or any empowerment, and providing them with an opportunity to earn a living.

There was a lot of research showing that virtuous things happen in a society when women have access to capital. Mortality rates can go down. Investments go into health and education for the children. Better housing gets invested in. There’s a virtuous cycle when women have access to capital. Microfinance institutions were showing that.

I thought we could train local ladies to do simple eye screenings and sell the eyeglasses to their neighbors and keep the costs affordable, but at a place where they can make a small margin. That was when the idea came of creating a livelihood for the women and sustaining livelihoods for customers. That’s what we’ve been working on over the last six years.

Q: It’s about a lot more than eyeglasses. This is a business model, right?

This is not just charity, although the intention is charitable; it is a nonprofit organization. The mission is to improve people’s lives through better vision and economic empowerment. It’s not a health organization as much as it is an economic development organization. We use the health product to help economic development along.

Q: Your sales people, the women in the villages, have an entire eye kit in a backpack, right?

People have probably heard the term “microcredit”; what we do is microfranchising. Like Subway has a franchise store, our backpack is our unit of franchise. That backpack has all the contents people need to start their little business: eyeglasses, an inventory of the eyeglasses, eye charts, repair kits, a uniform so they look professional, marketing materials, all the forms they need, a mirror so their customers can see what their glasses look like. We call it our microfranchise.

Q: Most of the local entrepreneurs are women. Is that intentional?

It is intentional. We looked at the literature and became convinced that women were at the heart of the solution to developing economies and societies. For too long, because women didn’t have power in these communities, the resources the men had weren’t geared toward those things that would move society forward, such as investing in your children.