By Nathan Guma and Pamela Muronzi
Growing up, Samantha Nyathi always had a great passion for public health.
“As someone who is short-sighted, my personal experiences pulled me towards eye care programming, and I get satisfaction from helping save people’s sight. Eye health equals better opportunities in all spheres of life,” she says.
Today, she makes part of women that are spearheading gender-sensitive health work in Zimbabwe to reduce the effects of Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTD).
NTDs are a diverse group of 20 conditions prevalent in tropical areas affecting impoverished communities, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). While treatable, they have gone on to affect over 1.7 billion people across the world.
The diseases are called ‘neglected’ because the people who are affected by them have a low status in public health priorities.
Research says women are more likely to be blind or have visual impairment than men and have poorer access to eye care services, and women with disabilities are three times more likely not to access the healthcare they need, compared to men without disabilities.
Samantha, who is also the senior programmes manager at Sightsavers, a UK charity operating in over 30 countries, that seeks to end avoidable blindness, has been helping women access treatment for diseases like Trachoma, a treatable disease that has mainly been affecting people in rural areas.
NTDs have escalated visual impairment over the past decades. In 2020, an estimated 49.1 million were blind, up from 34.4 million in 1990, according to Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO).
Nyathi says her work has been satisfying.
“With the Trachoma programme, we have delivered sight-saving medicines to more than three million people in the country and have conducted over 3 000 eye lid surgeries, to save the sight of people with advanced trachoma,” Nyathi says.
She has been in the trenches to cover the eye-health gap between women and men.
“The Accelerated Trachoma Elimination Program (ATEP) covers all provinces in the country, providing medicines and eye surgeries to those who need them in 23 districts endemic for the blinding disease. The Inclusive eye health project is being implemented in Matabeleland North and South,” Nyathi says.
Charleen Gumbo, who is project coordinator for inclusive eye health at Sightsavers Zimbabwe, has also been leading an inclusive eye health project in Matabeleland North province, and is passionate about promoting health services which improve the quality of life for vulnerable groups in hard-to-reach areas, especially women.
Together, they have also been reaching marginalised populations in remote areas who still use energy sources like firewood, which spearheads preventable eyesight loss.
“Research by the University of Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Population Health and the Chinese Academy of Medical Science and Peking University, Beijing, research about use of solid fuel impacting eye problems is interesting and highlights that many factors can affect our vision, but it is not the only factor.
“It raises the point that there are many avoidable causes to consider in the global eye health sector,” said UK-based Sumrana Yasmin, Sightsavers UK senior global technical lead, in an email.
Peter Bare, Sightsavers country director for Zimbabwe said: “It is vital that we all work together to make sure all women and girls have access to proper eye healthcare, and women like Samantha and Charleen are leading the way.
“Without action, women will continue to go blind in greater numbers than men and continue to have their contribution to education and employment curtailed.”
While more needs to be done, the aforementioned Samantha says there is need for more funding to promote eye care for vulnerable societies.
To reach more people affected by NTDs, we need more money, more health staff and more medical equipment across the country. We need to continue working closely with the ministry of health and local health centres to make sure our plans are aligned and we are reaching as many people as efficiently as possible,” she said.
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