Caroline Harper: What if we eliminated one of the world's oldest diseases?
At Sightsavers, an international NGO, Caroline Harper leads efforts to eliminate avoidable blindness around the world and fight for equal rights. Full bio
Double-click the English transcript below to play the video.
just for a moment,
instead of outwards,
the front of your eyeballs,
you went blind.
to a person who has trachoma.
from Zambia, he has trachoma.
he's going to go blind.
that's passed from person to person
will scar your eyelids
and they turn inside out.
the contact with children.
in places like Ethiopia
like this around their necks,
to pluck out their eyelashes.
temporary respite,
more vicious than before.
people in the world
because of trachoma.
as many as 200 million people
of a wall of a tomb in Northern Sudan.
in a very remote village,
to take us down into a little tomb.
there are tweezers next to it.
do you think that's trachoma?"
to the British Museum,
this is trachoma.
were painting pictures of trachoma
in that area today.
we know how to stop it.
community have all come together
that's not always the case
for Trachoma Control.
a strategy to fight it.
by the World Health Organization.
in somebody's front porch, if need be.
to be transported to the port in-country.
of community volunteers
with all that complex logistics.
has a pole like this.
different colors,
you should give somebody,
in the UK and in the US.
was a real problem in Georgia
eye hospital, Moorfields,
how important it is to wash their faces.
build latrines,
their animals from their living quarters
Sightsavers led an incredible program
Mapping Project.
to go district by district,
of over two and a half million people.
in order to download the data.
had a problem with trachoma.
"Well, does this strategy actually work?"
that we've made to date.
they've already eliminated trachoma,
or are in the process of
have the money they need,
to eliminate trachoma.
they don't have enough funding.
unless they get more.
that the progress to date may stall.
to the Audacious ideas guys,
over the next four or five years
that we can eliminate trachoma
the highest burden of the disease,
billion dollars' worth of donated drugs.
the impact that we'll have --
in Ethiopia and Nigeria.
that are still red.
which are in conflict --
where it's very difficult to work.
the strategy and the map.
with the governments
that our program is coordinated
if we could do this?
from the whole world.
I just want to share with you
the founder of Sightsavers,
for the whole country,
this is a devastating disease
of individual people.
for as long as she could remember.
she'd had the operation.
transformed her life.
and she was free of pain.
not to be moved by her story.
to go blind in agony anymore.
intractable problems in this world.
free from the fear of trachoma.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Caroline Harper - Advocate for visually impaired peopleAt Sightsavers, an international NGO, Caroline Harper leads efforts to eliminate avoidable blindness around the world and fight for equal rights.
Why you should listen
Dr. Caroline Harper's ultimate goal is to see herself out of a job. She runs Sightsavers, an organization with global offices that strives to eliminate avoidable blindness and ensure that people with disabilities have equal rights. Up to 75 percent of sight loss can be cured or prevented, and her team hopes to achieve their goals so spectacularly that the organization is no longer needed.
Harper worked in the gas industry until 2002, before co-founding a management business that specialized on turnaround sales of energy companies. But during what she describes as a mid-life gap year, she visited a number of developing countries and felt drawn to international development. "My own family has a lot of blindness, so the mission of Sightsavers really resonated for me," she said. "I have now been its CEO for 13 years, and every year something more incredible happens. The best moments are when I visit some of the countries where we work, sit with people in their communities and realize that what we do has a massive impact. I am so lucky."
Harper is a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for her work to protect the sight of people in developing countries. Sightsavers works with a range of partners and is supported by organizations such as The Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Trust and UK aid through the UK government's Department for International Development.
Caroline Harper | Speaker | TED.com