Glasses for Mexican Children

I just heard that Yves Behar, a fancy-pants designer and a partner with the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project, is beginning a new project that is surprisingly down-to-earth! It's goal: to provide a solution to the need for glasses among low-income kids in Mexico. Apparently about a half million children entering school down here in Mexico each year need glasses, and few of them get a pair. Even fewer get cool ones...

Fuseproject says: "Currently, the percentage of children in need of lenses at or above .75 correction [...] can be as high as 60-70% in some schools in states like Morelos, Sonora and Chiapas. The average classroom need percentage is 11%. Additionally, the wearing of glasses is looked at as a handicap, this social stigma adds to the resistance to correct the problem," (taken from here).

Behar's group has apparently gotten the manufacturing cost of a pair of these glasses down to 10 bucks.  The glasses come in five styles, three sizes and seven colors and apparently are designed to look cool.  The project, called "Ver Bien para Aprender Mejor", is being co-funded by the Mexican government, Augen Optics, and the non-profit created for this program. Their aim is to produce and give out 300,000 pairs of glasses a year.

The idea is that school children will receive eye exams from their local optometrist, or from a visiting one if none is available, and their prescriptions will be sent off to create the glasses, which should arrive back to the children within a few weeks.  The coolest part is the design of the glasses, which pop apart hot dog-style when you need to replace the lenses with a new prescription. Behar talks a lot about valuable design: "What I'm always trying to demonstrate is that you can get high-quality design at a low price point when a low price is just one of the criteria you are using in creating the design," (taken from here). He's an interesting guy!

Learn more about the project here.

Since I mentioned the OLPC project in passing, I'm going to indulge and include it in today's post! If you've done some traveling/volunteering around Latin America, you may have run across one of the signature little green laptops that OLPC distributes (at left).

Their mission: "To create educational opportunities for the world's poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning." Yeah! Joyful, self-empowered learning is something we can all get behind, right?

The OLPC Mexico wiki is a good source of info on what's happening with the program within Mexico. Check it out! Contribute or just feel good about it!