People who suffer from poor eyesight in low income communities often lack access to affordable eyecare and reading glasses. This impacts their educational performance, financial productivity and life-chances.
Adam Boxer, the co-founder of Wessex Social Ventures (WSV), is a designer and innovator who uses business thinking and frugal innovation to tackle the basic problems that hold people back in life. One of these is basic problems is lack of affordable eyecare.
Wessex Social Ventures Limited provides pre-designed business models that have shown their ability to create widespread impact in communities. WSV packages these business models into a “Business in a Box (BiaB)” for easy replication.
WSV’s current portfolio of BiaB includes a partnership with DOT Glasses to provide affordable reading glasses and eyecare in Kenya. WSV trains and provides partners and local entrepreneurs with the ability to run small DOT Glasses’ businesses. The businesses then sell glasses for $5, This is on average 5x cheaper than other myopic (short-sightedness) glasses on the market. With most of our customers being first time glasses customers.
With QCT’s support, WSV has been able to:
- Deliver 30 glasses kits and 800 replenishments to the DOT glasses partner for distribution to the agents and identified 6 locations for DOT glasses operations in Kenya.
- Establish and run a revolving fund where 30 glasses kits were distributed to partner on credit.
- Train the staff of 7 partner to set up and support the DOT agents in Kenya.
- Build a local team and set up the DOT glasses (DG) headquarters in Kenya as the DG transitions its headquarters from Czech Republic.
“QCT has given us the freedom to test a new approach to distributing the glasses in the communities we work in, with potential to scale massively. Alongside this they have given us amazing support in analysing our business and identifying where we need to improve.”
Adam Boxer
