Vision Care Reaches Taita Taveta County

Our GoodVision Kenya team just launched a new approach to one of the country’s toughest eye care challenges: there simply aren’t enough optometrists to go around. Across Kenya, optometrists are few and far between, with many rural counties having none at all. Rather than wait for that gap to close on its own, our team decided to work with what’s already there.

Taita Taveta County, home to more than 340,000 people, has only one ophthalmologist and two ophthalmic clinical officers, and no public-sector optometrists whatsoever. So GoodVision partnered with the County Government of Taita Taveta, the County Department of Health, CLIF, and the Wakujaa Foundation to try something different: training a general nurse already working at Mwatate Sub-County Hospital to provide refraction services herself, with a licensed optometrist guiding her remotely through every step.

The nurse completed a five-day, competency-based training covering everything from vision screening and basic eye exams to dispensing spectacles and patient counseling. She also learned to use the GoodVision App, a tele-refraction platform that connects her to an optometrist by live video during real patient visits. The optometrist reviews her findings, walks her through the refraction process in real time, and signs off on the final prescription before any glasses are dispensed, so patients get expert-level care even without a specialist in the room.

Early results are encouraging. The model is proving both technically workable and genuinely effective, expanding access to quality eye care without requiring an optometrist to be physically present at every facility. That’s a meaningful shift for regions like Kenya’s north and east, where fewer than 1 in 100 people who need glasses actually have them or are wearing the right prescription.

The team isn’t stopping at Taita Taveta. Building on this early success, GoodVision is extending the same model to schools in Lodwar and Marsabit and to a health facility in Kilifi County, with more partnerships in the works wherever eye care professionals are scarce. Next up for Taita Taveta: reaching the communities furthest from care, those cut off by distance, terrain, or poverty, so that a lack of specialists no longer means a lack of sight.