Malawi Optometry Outreach 2025

Hello, we are a team of 6 student Optometrists from Cardiff University. This June, we will be travelling to the East-African nation of Malawi for two weeks with Professor Barbara Ryan and Sharon Beatty. We will be travelling through the country providing rural villages with sight tests and prescription glasses, helping identify harmful conditions and building up a better eyecare system throughout Malawi. We will also be visiting hospitals to help train current students with limited resources in refraction testing, so that our work will continue to make a difference after we have left. Malawi is a country where sight threatening conditions such as Cataracts, Trachoma and Glaucoma are far more common and treatments are limited. For this reason, not only is the money that you help us raise going towards the transportation and distribution of spectacles and optical equipment (including medications, sanitary products and more), but also to help fund as many Cataract surgeries as possible. These surgeries cost just £30 in Malawi. As the fourth poorest country in the world, this is around one years of wages for the people there and could potentially reverse the effects of their blindness entirely.

We believe that this is incredibly important work. The Malawian people, 22 million strong, has just approximately 100 optometrists, that's 1 optician for every 220,000 people! The care we plan to provide has been received well in the past. Peter Hong, MBE, has been organsing outreaches across the developing world for 30 years, and one of his first trainees is now the head of the local School of optometry in Lilongwe (capital city). Cardiff students have been by his side for 25 of those years too!

As well as this, we are also collecting old pairs of glasses to be redistributed to the people of Malawi. In the UK we are fortunate enough to have access to the best optical materials possible, such as making lenses thinner to fit in frames and protecting us from Ultra-violet light. the people we aim to help do not have access to this level of aid and technology, so any pairs you may have lying around, no matter their age or prescription, could be vital in restoring the sight of a Malawian or assist us in training the students. If you have anything to give, please get in contact with one of our team members.

We'd like to thank you so much in advance for any generous donations you can help us with, every little will help in the development of this beautiful nation! If you want to follow our progress, or learn more about the common eye conditions we'll be helping out with, follow us on our team Instagram @malawi_optometry

Thank you so much,

-Ben, Anna, Bill, Sarah, Alex, Tilly