How I Am Contributing Towards The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

The United Nations first Sustainable Development goal is to end all forms of extreme poverty everywhere by 2030. Whilst this seems a big feat, it is not impossible to achieve this.

Eradicating extreme poverty by 2030 is something that the Tej Kohli & Ruit Foundation is built upon. Curing needless blindness has been shown to directly impact levels of poverty. A study in the Lancet showed that curing needless blindness can allow those living in poverty to increase their economic productivity by up to 1,500% of the cost of surgery during the first postoperative year. The study goes on to discuss that “future (health) work should focus on promoting the accessibility and quality of cataract surgery in developing countries”.

Dr Sanduk Ruit and I are committed to working towards ending extreme poverty by making quality cataract surgery available to hundreds of thousands of patients who are living with cataract blindness in the developing world.

A Cure For Life

One recent patient includes single mother Parsa from the Bahjang district in Nepal. The Tej Kohli & Ruit Foundation first visited Bahjang in December 2021. It was here we discovered Parsa and her two young daughters who were suffering from cataracts in both eyes. Parsa was scared that her daughters may become completely blind and suffer at the hands of poverty for the rest of their life.

Teams from the Tej Kohli & Ruit Foundation recently returned to Bahjang to increase their intervention in the area. Parsa and her daughters came to the latest camp for a check-up following their surgery in 2021. Parsa informed us that since her children's life changing surgery they have been able to excel in school, her economic situation has improved and she no longer worries when they will next be able to eat.

It is stories like this that illuminate the fact that curing needless blindness in developing areas is an effective method of tackling blindness. The unique partnership between Dr Sanduk Ruit and I means that the Tej Kohli & Ruit Foundationhas been able to cure nearly 29,000 patients of cataract blindness in less than two years.

Curing Blindness To Rid Of Poverty

I have been enthusiastically following his foundation’s impact since its creation and have visited camps in both Nepal and Bhutan. I have always been in awe and impressed with Dr Ruit’s surgical methods and how he and his teamcure thousands in such a short space of time.

Dr Ruit and I are wholly aligned with the #2030InSight mission to make curing vision a fundamental economic, social and development issue as part of the #1 UN's Sustainable Development Goal target to eradicate extreme poverty. We also are in full support of those 60 countries and eye health organisations who are calling upon the United Nations to create a Special Envoy on Vision.

For more information on Tej Kohli as a philanthropist visit tejkohliruit.com and to read more of his views go to his Medium.

To read about Tej Kohli as an investor visit Kohli Ventures.

Find out more about Tej Kohli: Tej Kohli the technologist investing in human triumph, Tej Kohli the philanthropist trying to cure the developing world of cataracts and Tej Kohli the London tycoon with a generous streak.

The Tej Kohli & Ruit Foundation was founded in March 2021 by London philanthropist Tej Kolhi and Kathmandu ‘God of Sight’ Dr Sanduk Ruit. As of November 2022 the NGO had screened 170,022 patients and cured 22,663of blindness at 91 outreach camps in Nepal, Bhutan and Ghana. The Tej Kohli & Ruit Foundation is a restricted fund operating under the auspices of Prism The Gift Fund, registered UK charity number 1099682. The Foundation targets the #1 United Nations Sustainable Development Goal of reducing poverty by making large-scale surgical interventions to cure blindness at the grassroots in the developing world. All treatments are provided completely free, with 100% of the funding coming from Tej Kohli and the Kohli family.