The not-for-profit Tej Kohli Foundation was set up to operate in areas blighted by extreme poverty and to reach out to those who hoped for a brighter future. For many years and under the direction of Wendy and Tej Kohli, the Tej Kohli Foundation has supported projects at the heart of communities which have been neglected, especially when interventions can help to combat a lack of education, poor health or prejudice. Our longstanding ‘Funda Kohli’ project has fed hundreds of children and young families every day in Costa Rica without interruption since 2005.

Today the Tej Kohli Foundation is best known for the Tej Kohli mission to end the needless blindness that occurs because of poverty and inequality. Worldwide there are 45 million people who are bilaterally blind and another 135 million who have severe visual impairment in both eyes. A staggering 90% of these individuals live in the poorest countries in the world where issues such as poverty and inequality have created a pervasive treatment gap. The social and economic impact of this avoidable, needless and often curable blindness is incalculable.

It was 2010 when our founder Tej Kohli started to fund corneal transplant surgeries at Niramaya Hospital in India. The success of this activity quickly grew, so in 2015 we launched the Tej Kohli Cornea Institute at the LV Prasad Hospital in Hyderabad, a World Health Organisation collaborating centre. Between 2015 and 2019 the Tej Kohli Cornea Institute completed 43,255 free surgical procedures to cure and alleviate blindness in some of the world’s poorest people. The Tej Kohli Cornea Institute also welcomed 223, 404 outpatient and collected 38,225 donor cornea for eye banks.

We have become expert in making grassroots interventions which make an immediate and visible impact. We have also become highly adept at managing our resources so that nearly 100% of our funding is spent directly on helping people, rather than on organizational overhead costs. However, the hard truth is that it is impossible to eliminate needless blindness using current methods, which often rely on evasive surgical procedures and transplants. This type of treatment is entirely inaccessible to the overwhelming majority of blind people in the world.

In order to end blindness we must get better at prevention by improving healthcare access and introducing rapid new diagnostics tools. We also need to create new treatment solutions that are affordable, accessible and scalable ‘for the masses’. Therefore, in recent years Tej Kohli has provided additional funding to enable the Tej Kohli Foundation to support scientific and technological advances in the fight against needless blindness.

For many years, our Applied Research division in London and Canada has been working on a liquid biosynthetic replacement for corneal transplant surgery. In 2019 we also inaugurated our Cornea Program in Boston, USA, which is also developing biosynthetic alternatives to surgery; as well as developing innovative new tools to prevent blindness, including rapid diagnostics tools that utilize DNA-hybridization and nano string technologies.

Over the years we have remained faithful to the values upon which the Tej Kohli Foundation was founded. In the United Kingdom we have expanded our ‘Rebuilding You’ mandate to fund robotic 3D-printed ‘bionic’ arms that improve the confidence and prospects of limb different teenagers as part of our ongoing #FutureBionics program. Our ongoing ‘Food Support’ program has is supporting grassroots organisations to develop a sustainable infrastructure to combat holiday hunger amongst younger people within minority London communities.

The most recent chapter of the Tej Kohli Foundation began in 2021 when we launched our most ambitious project to date. The Tej Kohli & Ruit Foundation is an independent not-for-profit which brings together Tej Kohli with Dr. Sanduk Ruit in a unique partnership that will seek to screen 1,000,000 patients and cure 300,000 of cataract blindness worldwide by 2026. Cataracts are the leading cause of blindness, accounting for half of the world’s 40 million blind, with the majority living in the developing world and 5 million new cases each year.

On 30 March 2021 the Tej Kohli & Ruit Foundation conducted its first high volume cataract outreach surgeries in the highly symbolic location of Lumbini in Nepal, the birthplace of Buddha, curing 400 individuals of cataract blindness during a four-day mission. Tens of thousands of patients have since been screened and many thousands have been cured of cataract blindness.

Going forward the vast majority of the resources of the Tej Kohli Foundation will be deployed into the Tej Kohli & Ruit Foundation as our primary area of focus as we deliver free cataract surgeries in territories including Nepal, Northern India, Indonesia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, North Korea, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Tanzania, Lebanon and Syria. Our longer-term goal is to establish and fund a network of permanent community eye hospitals in every location.

The #1 goal of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals is to end poverty in all its forms everywhere. We know that this can only be achieved if the world simultaneously brings an end to needless blindness. The Tej Kohli & Ruit Foundation will be demonstrating how this can be achieved and sharing stories to inspire and provoke action from others. You can read more on the Tej Kohli & Ruit Foundation hub on the Evening Standard.