Projet de Création d’un Centre Communautaire de Lutte contre la Cécité au Bénin

Avoidable blindness most often affects disadvantaged populations who do not have access to good-quality eye care. It is most often found amongst the poorest people, women and marginalised groups. 90% of the world’s blind people live in developing countries.
In Southern countries and especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, the principal causes of avoidable blindness are cataracts, glaucoma, corneal opacity, trachoma, child blindness and onchocerciasis (river blindness). In its report on the West African Sub-Region, the WHO mentions that only 20% of people in need of eye care are properly treated.
Visual deficits can interfere with several different daily activities. For adults, job prospects are very limited and participation in a wide variety of activities is severely limited. Add to that the loss of social status and self-esteem.

The CCLC uses a community approach to cultivate awareness of eye problems and the need for immediate treatment of these problems, through the use of ICT.
The Community Relays use smartphones to take pictures of eye problems detected or presented to them. Once these images have been sent to the e-ophthalmology platform, the patients will benefit from remote treatment using the instructions given by ophthalmology specialists connected to the platform. The cases dealt with on the CCLC have a code that allows follow-up messages to be received on a mobile phone from the e-ophthalmology platform. At present, almost 1,500 persons have already benefited from primary eye care in the community thanks to ICT applied in the field of eye care.

The Community Centre for Combating Blindness has dedicated itself to resolving this problem by detecting common eye conditions through Community Relays properly equipped for recognising these conditions. The CCLC uses Information and Communication Technology (ITC) with the aim of reducing levels of avoidable blindness and rehabilitating the visually impaired.