Projet de Création d’un Centre Communautaire de Lutte contre la Cécité au Bénin
Making eye care accessible to the Beninois population
Project start date : 01/09/2019
Beneficiary country : Benin
About the project
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.
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 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.
165 Full-Time equivalents
9 Employees
5 Volunteers
5 Service providers


1 500
Number of beneficiaries since launch
Target audience
- Healthcare professionals and structures (hospitals, healthcare centres/clinics, health networks)
- Entire population
- Dependents/persons with disabilities
- Patient family/entourage
- Other
Project objectives
- Decreased morbidity
- Reduced suffering
- Improved treatment
Materials used
- Cellular (mobile) phone
- Smartphone
- Tablet
- Computer
- Connected objects
Technologies used
- Mobile telecommunications (without data connection)
- Internet
- Geolocation
- Mobile app (Android, iOS, Windows Phone, HTML5, etc.)
- Other (please specify)
About the sponsor
Coopérative CCLC benin-cecite
The Community Centre for Combating Blindness (CCLC) is a simplified cooperative society that specialises in basic eye care at community level, offering innovative and high-quality treatments in response to problems of accessibility to eye care and to isolation of visually impaired persons in Benin and the West African Sub-Region.
Sector : Institutions (Communities, public authorities, NGOs, foundations, etc.)
Country of origin :
Contact : Sponsor website Project website
Offline use
Yes
Open source
Yes
Open data
Yes
Independent evaluation
No
Partners
ONG - Association des Paramédicaux pour la Solidarité et le Développement
Healthcare (professionals and structures)
ONG HUENUSU
Institutions (Communities, public authorities, NGOs, foundations, etc.)