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The Tej Kohli and Ruit Foundation: The organisation that is eliminating extreme poverty by curing blindness

The Tej Kohli and Ruit Foundation is an organisation that has cured over 17,000 people of cataract blindness via grassroots interventions across the developing world. Co-founder Tej Kohli has explained why he believes that this is the best way to increase economic production in marginalised communities.

The Tej Kohli and Ruit Foundation are a grassroots intervention organisation which means that rather than taking a top-down approach, they go directly to the root of the issue and work their way up to support isolated communities.

Intervening in developing nations such as Nepal, the Tej Kohli and Ruit Foundation aims to create a legacy of change. The organisation is founded upon the basis of promoting the accessibility of healthcare to turbocharge economically disadvantaged communities.

The Foundation is an NGO that is the result of Tej Kohli and Dr Sanduk Ruit being united on their vision of creating economic change. Their mission is to cure 300,000 to 500,000 people of blindness and lift them out of poverty by 2030.

There are estimated to be around 2.2 billion people across the globe with some form of visual impairment. Nearly half of those are suffering from cataracts which cause vision loss or complete blindness. In the first year of operation, the Tej Kohli and Ruit Foundation successfully cured over 13,000 people and has now reached 17,289.

The Tej Kohli and Ruit Foundation have collaborated with eight hospitals in Nepal alone. Working alongside local doctors has created a system of sustainable education. This has created a legacy of surgical methods - improving the state of eye care in the nation. Curing cataract blindness has been found to have a significant effect on the rate of poverty in low-income countries. In a study regarding cataract blindness, it was shown that curing those suffering from the sight-loss allows people to increase their economic productivity by up to 1,500% of the cost of surgery during the first postoperative year.

This has led the Tej Kohli and Ruit Foundation to commit their mission to other nations such as the Kingdom of Bhutan. Although the country has decreased the rate of blindness from 1.5% to 1% since 2009, cataract blindness has remained the main cause of blindness. It has been discovered that 53.8% of blind people have complete vision loss due to cataracts which can be easily cured in the western world.

Working towards achieving the first of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG1) is to eliminate extreme poverty. Some projections have suggested that by 2030 around 6% of the global population will still live in extreme poverty.

More than 90 per cent of the world’s blind live in low-income and marginalised countries where poverty and blindness are closely connected. The main cause of blindness is cataracts, which affect an estimated 95 million people worldwide. In low-and middle-income countries, cataracts account for 50 per cent of all blindness, compared to only five per cent of all blindness in the western world.

There is a multitude of reasons why people fall into poverty after becoming blind. Linking poverty and blindness seems like an unlikely pairing. However, it has become increasingly clear that the link between the two is both a cause and effect of each other.

Due to the main cause of blindness being cataracts, which affect an estimated 95 million people worldwide, the Tej Kohli and Ruit Foundation chose to focus on curing this visual impairment above others. This proved to work well, especially due to Dr Ruit’s innovative surgery. This surgery allows patients to be operated on in just seven minutes and also costs $50 which is significantly cheaper compared to other methods of surgery.

In low and middle-income countries, cataracts account for 50% of all blindness in the developing world, compared to only 5% of all blindness in the western world. It is estimated that 0.32% of Nepal’s population is registered blind which is much higher compared to the US where 0.19% of the population is registered blind.

The co-founders of the Tej Kohli & Ruit Foundation both draw from their own career and life experiences to enhance the impact of the NGO in developing countries. Nepal-born Dr Sanduk Ruit is from humble beginnings. Growing up in the isolated village of Olangchungola, he was unable to access education or healthcare due to the closest school and hospital being a week’s walk away. In his teen years, Ruit lost his sister to tuberculosis, which is a preventable and curable disease.

Following the passing of his sister, Ruit became motivated to become a doctor and ensure that everyone has equal access to healthcare. Throughout his prolific career, Dr Ruit is now known as the “God of Sight” and has achieved many milestones such as receiving the Ramon Magsaysay Award, Asia’s equivalent of a Nobel prize - after curing thousands of needless blindness. Even after so much success, he has no plan to slow down anytime soon.

Indian-born Tej Kohli made a successful career for himself by building and selling a series of companies that specialised in online payment systems as well as investing in real estate across the globe. Since then, Tej Kohli has given a sizable portion of his accumulated wealth to cure blindness in low-income nations. It has been shown that the cure of needless blindness can positively impact socio-economic productivity in developing nations. This is why Kohli has committed to continue to spend whatever it takes for the Tej Kohli and Ruit Foundation to reach its target of curing at least 300,000 cataract blindness by 2030.

The Tej Kohli and Ruit Foundation is a restricted fund operating under the auspices of Prism The Gift Fund, registered UK charity number 1099682.

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