‘DURING THIS JOURNEY, WE OFTEN WONDERED IF WE WERE TRYING TO ACCOMPLISH THE IMPOSSIBLE. IT’S BEEN LIKE SKATING ON THIN ICE. THE CRACKS OPEN UP, BUT SOMEHOW WE GOT AROUND THEM. AND IN THE END, WE GOT ACROSS.’

So says James Chen after five years at the helm of Clearly, the campaigning body he set up as he intensified his lifetime mission to help the billions who struggle with poor vision because they have no access to sight tests and glasses.

That journey reaches an important milestone at the turn of the year when Clearly joins forces with the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness.

The merger will create a formidable force in the eye-care sector as Clearly’s creative and disruptive approach to campaigning is combined with the IAPB’s unparalleled reach and authority as a leader in this field.

It has not been an easy voyage and at times James and his team have felt they were banging their heads against a very thick brick wall.

They were coming at the vision problem in a way that was alien to many of the NGOs and experts in the sector. Their priority, rightly, had always been to try to reduce the number of blind people in the world by tackling avoidable blindness, the kind caused by cataracts, trachoma and other diseases.

James came on the scene with a different aim. He wanted to target all those people across the world who could not see clearly because of refractive errors that lead to long and short-sightedness. Most of these people just needed glasses but as James, first, and then the team he assembled, came to realise, most of them neither had access to sight tests nor glasses. It was a shocking omission and one that James, who struggled with poor vision as a young man, pledged to tackle.

Using figures first authorised by Essilor, the leading lens-maker, Clearly trumpeted the claim that one third of the world’s population – some 2.5 billion – were in the poor vision category and James bravely announced that he wanted all those people to be able to see properly before a human set foot on Mars.

The Clearly goals were initially looked on with curiosity verging on suspicion by an eye sector that appeared strangely fragmented with different parts of the world doing their own thing and often not talking to each other. That was a problem but an even bigger one was the attitude of world governments and coordinating authorities like the UN and World Bank. Given all the other difficulties on their plate – including tackling diseases like malaria, ebola and Aids/HIV – poor vision was not a priority and featured nowhere in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) laid down in 2015.

WHAT WE’VE ACHIEVED

After five years, the dial has definitely moved. Poor vision, or uncorrected refractive error (URE) as the experts label it, is now firmly on the radar of the sector and world authorities, as last October’s long-awaited report on vision from the World Health Organization dramatically attested with its finding that at least 2.2 billion people had a vision impairment with at least 1 billion uncorrected.

In the words of one of the most senior figures in the eye sector, ‘Clearly has rattled a lot of cages that needed to be rattled.’

James, who is to become a global ambassador for the IAPB, and the Clearly team can look back on five years of success. There have been triumphs, and the occasional disappointment along the way, but the highs have undoubtedly outnumbered the lows. In this article, based on chats with all the key players, we diagnose Clearly’s five-year journey, the moments when the hard work began to produce the results we craved, the things we would have done differently, and the lessons for future campaigns of this sort.

It was a meeting at a conference between James and Greg Nugent, co-founder with Godric Smith of Inc. London, and marketing chief at the 2012 London Olympics and Paralympics, that led to the eventual setting up of Clearly.

James had already been involved in the eye-care world for over a decade, having founded Adlens, a company specialising in adjustable power lenses, with the aim of producing them commercially in the developed world and as a social enterprise in the developing countries. At this stage neither the World Bank nor the NGOs bit on the concept. Undaunted, James decided to set up a charity, Vision for a Nation, in Rwanda, supplying glasses and seconding staff from Adlens. Partnering with the Rwandan ministry of health in a remarkable tie-up, it has brought primary eye-care to 500 health centres in the country resulting in 2.5 million people being screened. If it could be done in Rwanda, why not the rest of the world? That was to become the James Chen mantra in the years that followed.

So when James and Greg Nugent met, the famously persuasive Greg convinced him that he needed an international campaign to advance his cause. The aim was agreed: Universal Access to Vision Correction. ‘Operation Oversight’ was the campaign’s name for a few months. ‘Clearly’ emerged as a more fitting name in the early weeks of 2016.

In summary, these are the highlights of Clearly’s five years.

2017

Armed with the Clearly team, James went to the World Economic Forum in Davos to make the case for action in January 2017, holding head-to-head meetings with the chief executives of some of the world’s leading companies, getting his message across at every opportunity, including with three former prime ministers Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Helle Thorning-Schmidt of Denmark as well as Princess Beatrice.

To further the journey, Clearly went to the birthplace of spectacles, the island of Murano on the northern outskirts of Venice in April 2017, and gathered the leaders from the eye-care world, government advisers, communications experts, and NGO chiefs to plan the campaign to alert world authorities to the crisis occurring right under their noses.

In 2017 James Chen produced his 170-page book, also called Clearly, in which he told how a 700 year old invention – yes, glasses – could change the world forever. And he identified the problems – the four Ds, distribution, diagnosis, dollars and demand – and produced a radical action plan for tackling them. We also produced a special China edition.

Parallel work was going on with the UN. Accompanied bypolitical consultant Will Straw, another member of Inc’stalented team, James had gone to the UN in September 2017to address a breakfast briefing along with Dr. Agnes Binagwaho,the former Rwandan health minister who was so important to the success of VFAN, and Kevin Cahill, the former head ofComic Relief who has been a strong supporter of Clearly. It was a small event, but it was a start, and it was attended by a UK minister, Baroness Sugg. There was another meeting at the UN in June 2018 and then the following October, James went back for the launch of the UN Friends of Vision group.

Some 54 countries, a quarter of the UN’s member states, have now attended one or more meetings of the group and Clearly owes much to Ambassador Aubrey Webson, who represents Antigua and Barbuda at the UN, for his help in getting this important body off the ground.

Clearly also launched major distinct campaigns under its main banner. It used social media tools and a letter from James to chief executives to put pressure on international companies to offer work-based sight tests to their employees.

To provide itself with ammunition Clearly commissioned a study, called Prosper and peer-reviewed by Lancet Global Health, to show how wearing glasses dramatically increased the productivity of Indian tea workers. It was to develop into the Power of Glasses research project with other studies on productivity, education and road safety in the pipeline.

2020

More recently Clearly has launched the Glasses in Classes campaign to get glasses into every school in the world to give children the best start in life, using terrifying statistics which suggest 500 million children could suffer from myopia by 2050.

As Clearly’s time as a free-standing organisation neared an end we produced for World Sight Day in October 2020 an anthology of children’s stories and illustrations to boost Glasses in Classes. Celebrities and other contributors read bedtime stories from the book as the sun set in their time-zone, an ambitious project that fitted in terms of boldness with much that had gone before.

Meanwhile Clearly’s international advocacy has moved on apace. The fact that a quarter of the UN’s membership has joined the Friendsof Vision group is concrete confirmation that our message is striking home in an organisation that matters much. We staged an event at this year’s UN General Assembly in October and, in what would be a fantastic legacy for James, work is under way to get a General Assemblyresolution on vision early next year. That indeed would mark significant progress towards the ultimate aim that James set himself at the start – universal access to vision correction.

I have been involved with Clearly for most of its five years, and was honoured to collaborate with James on his book. For this article I spoke to several of those who have worked on the campaign for all or most of its life.

THE JOURNEY BEGINS

James recalls how in 2015 having begun his acquaintance with Greg he went to the Inc. office in London and was quizzed by Greg, Godric Smith and journalist and former Treasury adviser Catherine Macleod about his work in the vision sector. They told him he needed to bring all his work together under one banner and when he told them his own vision was ‘universal access to visioncorrection’ they seized on it and told him: “That’s it – you’ve got it.”

‘I had had all these things going on and in five minutes they helped me pull it all together,’ says James.

Greg recalls the meeting: ‘James is a visionary. He knew he had something world-beating but the way he explained it was not as powerful as it was. He had multiple visions and I think we helped to narrow it down to one major objective. I also started trying to convince him he needed to write a book.’

Inc’s design chief extraordinaire, Neil Minott, known to all as Chair, built a supporting deck for the fledgling Project Oversight which took out an advert in the New York Times as Greg and other Inc. staff headed to the United States to make an earlyassessment of turning James’s aspirations into an international campaign.

Purpose was hired to take charge of the American end of things and Verb organised the Clearly Labs events at various cities. At assorted workshops, experts from the eye world and elsewhere came up with all kinds of ideas for tackling the international problem of poor vision.

There was a random, haphazard feel to the proceedings and by the time we left San Francisco doubts over the direction we were taking began to surface. Says James: ‘These early days, it was all about trying to build momentum for public support. But it was not getting us where we wanted to be. It was almost as if we were trying to boil the ocean. It was untargeted.’ A major international event planned at the Amangiri resort in Utah was dropped and, with Inc. now running the show on its own, James and the team reviewed progress.

At around this time, towards the end of 2016, Will Straw and Simon Darvill, who had worked on the Britain Stronger in Europereferendum campaign, joined the Clearly ranks. Greg encouraged a strategy debate based on two models – Project (Red),the multinational campaign involving high powered corporate partners and celebrities to build public awareness and raise moneyto fight Aids, and XPRIZE, a non-profit body that organises competitions to spur innovation to help the community.

Looking back, most involved would agree the campaign has combined both facets, using the ‘old power’ tools of political and diplomatic engagement, and the ‘new power’ weapons of branding, influencers and social media. Simon Darvill says: ‘We learnt from Project (Red) and XPRIZE but we did not imitate them.’ He believes the key decision emerging from the review and then Venice was to advocate for change through the forums that mattered.

In the meantime, the Clearly Vision Prize went ahead with the leading competitors displaying their wares in front of judges in London. James says: ‘It was a good competition and it showed that in different parts of the world some people were coming up with innovative ideas to tackle the problems where they lived. But while it showed us some things that were going on in the vision world it confirmed to us that not enough was going on. It was showing us what we suspected – that there was no coordination of efforts and that we had to get to the policy-makers.’

The review of the campaign led to a change of tack and to a turning-point in its fortunes. Appropriately that was to happen in the place where glasses were invented 700 years ago, northern Italy.

Jennifer Chen, James’s chief of staff who has had an inside view of all Clearly’s landmark events, recalls an afternoon discussion chaired brilliantly by the marketing expert Adam Morgan, head of eatbigfish, a branding company that supports challenger brands.

Adam’s role was to coax out from the participants ideas for giving the campaign momentum. And that afternoon Astrid Bonfield, chief executive of the Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Trust, mentioned that the next year’s Commonwealth summit was to be held in London and added that ‘maybe we can do something together.’

Says Jennifer: ‘It was a simple statement but people swiftly saw the potential. We did indeed do something together. We worked with Astrid and other organisations in the field. We found out about this thing called the Committee of the Whole – the COW – which worked on resolutions to go before the main CHOGM summit. Clearly used its contacts in government and the civil service and before long we had hopes that the communique would acknowledge the vision problem. But it all went back to that discussion in Venice.’

Jennifer and James also saw Venice as the moment when Clearly decided to focus strongly on the development issue to give force to the campaign. ‘We knew that the UN had not included good vision specifically in the Sustainable Development Goals and yet it was obvious that it was vital,’ says Jennifer.

Jennifer recalls how at Venice, Godric Smith, co founder of Inc, quietly described good vision as the ‘golden thread’ that ran through all the SDGs. ‘It was a memorable intervention and from that instant it became a phrase that all of us in Clearly would use time and again.’

Says James: ‘This was the moment when we took vision from exclusively a health silo into the development issue. That was to be crucial. We also realised this could not be just a public-facing campaign. We had to be more targeted and as Greg said we had to do it on our terms.’

THE COMMONWEALTH COMMITS

For our designer supremo Chair the highlight of the Clearly years was simply ‘the communique.’ ‘When the Commonwealth headspassed that resolution on eye-care it was a huge moment because at last we had got one of the world’s important forums representing an area where half of those struggling with poor vision live to take notice. From that moment we were gaining traction.’

Chair agrees that the progress in the Commonwealth and the UN stemmed from Venice. ‘Until that point, we had been trying to get everyone including the public and the big eye companies on board. Our cry was “calling all visionaries.” But we needed to be aiming at the people who make policy. Venice was the engine for shifting poor vision to become a global development issue. Once we startedtying vision to the SDGs we were on our way. It was the big accelerator.’

Chair recalls that in the early days other organisations in the eye-care world took little or no interest in what Clearly was doing.So how did the change happen? ‘Look, we don’t make glasses and we don’t make lenses. But what we do and did is to make noise.And we have done that to great effect. A lot more people know what URE stands for these days.’

‘We’ve never been afraid to be audacious. I put Sightgeist into that category. That was a big, expensive project and we tried to pull off things that might not have been thought of in the past. But looking back on it I would give it at least eight out of 10.’

WHY 2.5 BILLION MATTERS

Several in Clearly, myself included, believe that using the2.5 billion benchmark for those lacking good vision was vital to our success. As mentioned earlier the figure was originally put out with the authority of Essilor but Graeme Mackenzie, our in-house optometrist and expert, did his own voluminous research, published on the Clearly website, which came up with a similar figure.

The sheer scale of the problem – a third of the world struggling – was a key factor in making the campaign newsworthy. News organisations need figures behind their stories. Chair believes Clearly’s merging into the IAPB is a massivecredit to James and the team who have worked with Clearly.‘Imagine if you were a start-up tech and after four years Google came along and said ‘would you like to join us’ that would be some achievement. Clearly has pulled it off.’

Jennifer Chen says that the importance of Adlens and VFAN to the Clearly story must not be underestimated. ‘When James met Greg, he already had many years of working in the eye-care world behind him. Yes, he was the philanthropist but he was the philanthropist with domain expertise behind him and that was to be so crucial in the years that followed.

‘Going out to the global vision community and seeking ideas and inventions through the Clearly Vision Prize was absolutely the right way to kick off,’ she says. ‘Without the research and the facts and figures to back us up we probably would not have progressed too far with the UN at that stage.’

‘The Inc. team excelled with Venice. It was a superbly organised event and one that changed things. Murano was symbolically just the right place to be with the 700-year history of glasses starting in that region. It gave us all a feeling that we were on the move.’

Jennifer adds that the Clearly book was important both for the campaign – ‘it gave us a calling card’ – and for James personally as a philanthropist. ‘The book identified the problems to spreading good vision across the world and then set out the solutions. Intermingled with all that were the wonderful stories of people who had been helped by the provision of glasses. It gave us the stamp of authority and credibility.’

Jennifer has mixed feelings about Sightgeist. ‘In many ways it was a superb event with lively speakers and a great message. But it was much more expensive at the end than when the idea was first put forward and we never quite got the audience in that room that we needed to justify it.’

Jennifer believes that James and all involved with Clearly can look back with pride on its achievements in waking the world to the vision problem. ‘For Clearly to find a home within the IAPB is a wonderful way to conclude this stage of the journey. For decades the eye-care world has had its different ways of doing things with different emphases on avoidable blindness and URE. The World Report on Vision last October drawing attention to the scale of the vision problem, and not just blindness, was great testimony to our work. I don’t think it’s overdoing it to say that we have helped to unite the sector.’

Greg says that Jennifer has been vital to the success of the project. ‘She has been pivotal, there all the time, sometimes having to play the hard cop. She has helped James make his dream come true.’

Graeme Mackenzie, a trained optometrist and academic, has been with James from his early involvement in the eye-care sector, including Adlens and VFAN, and has been Clearly’s resident ‘go-to’ person for domain expertise, research and just about anything else. In working on the book with James I found him the ultimate fact-checker andinspiration.

He believes the organisation has helped James to become a leader in the sector. ‘Clearly has been the agitator, thedisrupter, nearly always one step ahead of the big names. Since James came up with the Vision Prize others havefollowed. By getting out there and drawing attention to a problem of which the world was not aware Clearly hasmoved the needle. It was ahead of its time.’

For Graeme, too, Venice was a breakthrough. ‘We got theeye sector there yes, but we got a lot of creative thinkers from outside as well, and what you were seeing was people in the eye world having to get out of their echo chamber and think afresh about some of the ideas coming forward. It has taken a lot to get some people to talk about URE but Venice was where we started talking about good vision being important for the SDGs.

Will Straw, whose strategic skills have played a prodigious part in the Clearly story, cites as the number one achievement a ‘framing victory’, persuading the whole sector to recogniseand talk about the scale of the poor vision problem, and to see the tackling of that problem as vital to the fulfilment of the SDGs, not just as an eye-care and health issue. ‘We talked about the big numbers and were right to do so because that was the way of raising the profile of this issue. OK the WHO did not go quite as far as our 2.5 billion assertion, but they went a long way and talked about the need to face up to the overall vision crisis.’

Will says the Clearly book was crucial to winning that argument. ‘It forced us to think hard about what we were trying to say, to crystallise our views, and to generate clarity within the sector.’ Will cites the passing of the Commonwealth resolution and the moves towards a UN one as the next big achievement. ‘We used all the weapons at our disposal, our contacts in the diplomatic, royal and political spheres to build momentum behind the campaign, as well as building cooperation in the sector.

It was huge boost for us at the time. Similarly establishing the UN Friends of Vision has given us leverage at the right time. We have high hopes there as well.’

The other big plus, says Will, was the Prosper study showingthe great productivity gains from good vision. ‘This was brilliant work from Graeme and got us publicity in all the right places including the Financial Times, Economist and BBC. It also gave us a valuable advocacy device, enabling us to move the argument on from health. Again, we made the noise and got ourselves noticed.’

ADVOCATING WITH CREATIVITY

For Greg the number one achievement is that the sector and Clearly are now together with their objectives. ‘It is truly remarkable that in five years James has built up so much trust and made so many advances that past orthodoxies have been changed and improvingvision for all has become the aim of all.’

The second achievement was ‘the way we did it.’ Greg says: ‘I suppose we have broken all the rules. We did it in an exciting, entertaining way. We convinced the people who needed to be convinced that we could make a difference. We did it creatively, we did it in a fun way.’

For Greg the third highlight was ‘the tenacity of James’. ‘He believed in what he was doing. It is one thing to have the vision. It is another to turn it into reality and make it work. James had the tenacity, when others were saying No, to make it happen.’

Simon explains how on a visit to the lost property office at the UN he met a female worker who had been having trouble with an eye. He told her about the screenings and she went along. He was later told that the screening had detected a detached retina and she went to a hospital for treatment. Without the screening she could have lost her sight.

‘If ever you needed to show why action on poor vision and avoidable blindness should be talked about in the same breath this was it. Here was a routine test for eyesight that saved a woman’s eye.’

Simon, who will move to the IAPB as Head of External Communications at the handover, says combining the campaigning and advocacy skills of Clearly with the gravitas and international reach of the IAPB was a ‘perfect outcome’. ‘If the eye sector had been working properly there would have been no need for Clearly. James filled a vacuum.’

Although Clearly was largely a story of successes, even triumphs, all the players agreed on one disappointment. It was that despite the efforts of all concerned it was extraordinarily difficult to find other benefactors prepared to dig deep into their pockets to share some of the costs that James was prepared to incur.

As Jennifer says even when the Prosper study on productivity produced hugely valuable ammunition for the campaign and for the cause in general it was unbelievably hard to find others to step up to the plate. Other studies in the pipeline are delayed for want of sponsorship. The same was true of other big, expensive events, like Sightgeist, where one would have expected the eyewear and other companies to come forward. But they were conspicuous by their absence.

Graeme’s view on this is straightforward: ‘A lot of entrepreneurs like the low hanging fruit. They are happy to give to a cause, be recognised for it, and then step aside. Not many are like James and prepared to get down and dirty, getting their own experience of the domain they are assisting. It is frustrating that they do not take James’s entrepreneurial view of philanthropy.’

James himself is philosophical about it. He recalls it being suggested in the early days that the campaign should be able to raise some $5 million from other givers. ‘That was the definition of a good win, but it never happened,’ he says.

James says that while most wealthy people were happy to give, they generally did not then want to spend time and effort overseeing the spending of their money. ‘Give the money to an Oxbridge college, tick the boxes and the job is done.’

But that was not for James who spent years building up domain experience, finding out what worked and what did not work. ‘Vision for a Nation turned out to be a brilliant success but that does not mean there were not challenges along the way.It takes deep pockets to build that domain expertise. You learn from the failures as well as the successes. You build a network as I have with Graeme, Greg, Will and all of you, and you find together what goes and what does not go. Other philanthropistsdo not want that. The difference between those people and I is not the size of a cheque book. It is the degree to which you want to get involved. Yes, I wish we had been able to attract more people to come on board with their money, but that’s the way it is.’

‘Getting involved myself meant I could see very early on the existing high cost service delivery model for glasses was only fit-for-purpose in the developed world. We showed how the new technologies, from smartphone apps to drones and 3D printing,could allow us over time to develop new service delivery models in low resource environments, which help people live better lives and help developing economies grow.’ On the difficulty of finding extra funders Will Straw suggests that James was a victim of his own success. ‘In a sense he hascrowded out the funders by being associated so personally with the advances made by Clearly. Funders are more likely to go for new ventures which can carry their stamp rather than ones where a philanthropist is already in the driving seat and providing the funding needed.’

TARGETING A FEW TO GET A LOT

If James has another regret it was that the campaign has not taken off massively on social media. ‘I know it is oneof those issues that may not send the pulse racing but I wish that we had been able to get out there more in the social media world. That might have persuaded other philanthropists to step up to the plate.’

Will Straw acknowledges the frustration about social mediabut saw it as a consequence of the campaign that Clearly had fought. ‘At Venice the clear decision from which all followed was to focus our efforts on elite opinion rather than public opinion. To succeed on social media you haveto be either incredibly controversial or spend an awfullot of cash. ‘So I don’t regard it as a failure. In some waysit is a testimony to the way we have done the campaign. We have used social media but in a targeted way with thebudget we have.’

Greg, delighted that Clearly has found its home with the IAPB, believes there is still an opportunity for it to go for a major Project (Red)style mission bringing corporate partners and celebrities on board to continue the battle for good vision. ‘They could take this all beyond one man’s generosity and turn it into something bigger and wider.’ This could well happen. After the handover James will chair a campaigngroup overseeing, among other things, the IAPB’s efforts to make World Sight Day a consumer-facing moment.

Greg, pleased with the launch success of Rising Phoenix, the film about the history of the Paralympic movement on which he and othersin Inc. London worked, speaks of the prospect of making a film about vision. ‘I would love to make the Rising Phoenix equivalent on sight.If our book was read by 1,000 policy-makers, say, the film would reach a million people tomorrow.’

As for James he names the Commonwealth communique as his first highlight – ‘that gave us validation and justified all the work we had put in’ – with the Prosper study coming a close second because of the authority and weight it gave to Clearly’s efforts.

He also believes Sightgeist served an important purpose in helping the UK and American experts to come together and share their ideas.‘There was a London node and a US node. The US guys were more excited by market driven solutions while the Brits have always been traditionally more institutional. But here they were able to share the more edgy ideas. Until this point neither side had reached out to the other and if this could one day be replicated it would be a great thing to do.’

So what about the sector? How does it now regard Clearly and what it has achieved?

Caroline Harper, chief executive of Sightsavers, says the eye health sector has struggled historically to raise its profile, and to persuadedevelopment actors, as well as philanthropists and governments, to see the issue as a priority. ‘This was particularly true with the issueof the provision of glasses, as most NGOs in eye health tended to focus on conditions such as cataract and on hospital-based services. And the huge scale of the problems around refractive error, as well as the role of the private sector had meant that eye health organisations barely scraped the surface of what was needed.

Pictured below: Caroline Harper, CEO of Sightsavers (left) with Caroline Casey, Founder and Creator of The Valuable 500 (right).

‘James Chen wanted to change this, and probably for the first time, Clearly brought to bear public campaigning skills together with access to celebrities and a willingness to think differently. This enabled Clearly to produce some really powerful materials aimed at raising awareness of the issue to a wider public. A range of events were held – I will never forget the fabulous Sightgeist event.

‘By the end of 2019 the sector was in a different place – a combination of skilled advocacy by a number of NGOs and IAPB, working closely together, somevisionary leadership at WHO and the campaigning skills and network of Clearly, had resulted in eye health in all its forms rising up the agenda. The World Report on Vision,the Friends of Vision group at the UN (an initiative inspiredand led by Clearly), and the CHOGM meeting includingan event on eye health all pointed to 2020 being the year when eye health finally got the attention it deserved.This should have culminated at the IAPB General Assembly in October 2020 in Singapore, where the community wouldhave celebrated and Clearly would have been recognised as having played an important part. Sadly, the pandemiccame along.

Quite a tribute. Quite a vindication for Clearly and James’s decision to set it up.

So, as this stage of the journey nears its end James is rightly pleased with Clearly’s achievements. ‘You know I spoke about the thin ice. We could have fallen through but we did not. I feel blessed that having gone on that journey and encountered all the stumbles along the way I can now hand on something very worthwhile to the IAPB.

‘I believe in audacious philanthropy. I have always believed that private philanthropists should be prepared to take the risks and be ready to accept the consequences of failure.

‘My guiding principle has been privatising risk and socialising the benefits.

Private philanthropists have the freedom with their capitalto drive social change. That was my motivation in establishing Adlens, VFAN and Clearly. And I hope and believe we have seen many benefits. ‘Now as we merge with the IAPB we will be able to combine our campaigning work on school eye health, work-based sight tests and the SDGs with its massive influence and authority in this crucial sector. Together we will be stronger. The agency is the world leader on eye health advocacy, the voice of the sector at the WHO and the UN. It coordinates events like World Sight Day which we intendto become an even more important date on the calendar. We have moved into a good home.

‘Under the excellent Peter Holland and his team, they see things as we see them. When we started it looked like a risky business. People did not necessarily want to know us. But, wow, we have the Commonwealth and the UN thinking about the things we have been campaigning for. If I have derisked this territory, which is how I see the job of the philanthropist, I have done my job.’

And so say all of us.