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The Mo Dewji Foundation has performed 13,900 cataract surgeries across Tanzania, according to its own programme data, and a third of that total came in the first six months of this year.
It carried out 4,238 operations between January and June through twelve mobile eye camps, which take surgical teams into districts with no permanent eye care. The foundation has also screened and treated more than 75,000 people.
The pace is the notable part. A cataract operation takes minutes in a functioning hospital and restores sight almost immediately, but Tanzania has few ophthalmic surgeons outside its main cities, and the constraint has never been the medicine. It has been getting a surgeon, a theatre and a patient into the same place.
Mobile camps solve that by moving all three. One camp run with the Kym Rapier Foundation last year was expected to treat more than 5,000 patients in three days.
Nyla Mohammed Dewji, who writes for the foundation, set out the economic case in an article published by The Citizen on Sept. 15. Blindness is usually counted as a health problem or a personal loss, she wrote, and rarely as an economic one, even though losing sight means losing income, leaving the workforce and putting a household under strain. In a developing economy those costs accumulate without ever being recorded.
The foundation's internal social return on investment analysis puts the figure at about $7.62 of social value for every dollar spent.
That calculation is why eye care keeps winning its funding. The foundation selects causes by identifying critical problems in Tanzania and assessing which interventions produce the most impact per dollar, and cataract surgery has remained one of its strongest pillars on that test.
Where it wants to end up is out of the business entirely. Nyla Dewji described working toward a nationalised strategy that would make avoidable cataract blindness increasingly rare, and the foundation has been building community health profiles at every location it serves and passing the data to Tanzania's health ministry to shape national policy.
The work predates the foundation. Mohammed Dewji was elected member of parliament for Singida Urban in December 2005 at the age of 29, and spent a decade on health, education and water in the town where he was born, arranging 1,500 cataract surgeries among other things. He left parliament in 2015.
He runs MeTL Group, the conglomerate his grandmother founded and his father built up in the 1970s, spanning textiles, agriculture, beverages, logistics and financial services. Forbes valued him at $1.8 billion in October 2024, the youngest billionaire in Africa and the 17th richest, and he was the first Tanzanian on the magazine's cover in 2013.
Eye disease ranks among the ten most common health conditions in Tanzania, and most blindness there is preventable or treatable.
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