- German math teacher Martin Aufmuth designed EinDollarBrille (“One Dollar Glasses”), a flexible spring-steel frame with shatterproof lenses that can be bent into shape using a hand-powered machine the size of a shoe box.
- The non-profit he founded in 2012, now expanded internationally as GoodVision, operates in 11 countries and has reached more than a million people with affordable glasses.
- The World Health Organization estimates at least one billion people worldwide live with uncorrected vision impairment.
A pair of glasses costing about a dollar to make – designed in a German math teacher’s basement and built from spring steel and plastic – has now reached more than a million people in 11 countries, helping farmers, grandmothers and schoolchildren see clearly for the first time.
The basement belongs to Martin Aufmuth, a math teacher in Erlangen, Germany. In 2009 he read in Paul Polak’s book Out of Poverty that hundreds of millions of people worldwide had vision impairment they could not afford to correct. He could not square the figure with what he saw at home.
“It was the book Out of Poverty by Paul Polak,” Aufmuth says. “I thought, ‘This can’t be true.'”
It was. The World Health Organization estimates at least one billion people worldwide have a near or distance vision impairment that has yet to be addressed. Eighty percent of them could be helped with relatively easy means, like glasses.
The day after he finished the book, Aufmuth walked past a one-euro shop and saw reading glasses for a single euro.
“I thought, strange, we have this here. Why not elsewhere?” he says.
He looked into existing efforts and found nothing that worked at scale. Donated second-hand glasses tended to arrive mismatched and were poorly distributed.
“That wasn’t a solution for me,” he says.
So he disappeared into his basement to tinker. The result was the EinDollarBrille – the One Dollar Glasses – a frame made from highly flexible spring steel wire fitted with shatterproof plastic lenses. He demonstrates by popping the lenses out of his own pair, bending the frame, and clicking everything back together.
“You can take the lenses out, adjust everything,” he says. “You could run a jeep over it and it would not break.”
The manufacturing kit is just as portable as the glasses are durable. No electricity is needed and no industrial production line. The whole machine is hand-powered and small enough to fit in a shoe box.
“I was looking for a technical solution that could have a big impact,” he says. “That was it.”
In 2011, Aufmuth flew to Uganda with a group of eye specialists, carrying two prototype machines. He says people were already lining up before they had finished setting up.
“People were already lining up outside, waiting for glasses,” he recalls. “We could start immediately.”
He came home five kilograms lighter, he jokes, but with a refined system and a clear sense of what the work was. By 2012 he had founded the non-profit that would later expand internationally as GoodVision. The network now operates in 11 countries, employs around 600 people, and is funded mainly by individual donors.
“Private donations keep us moving,” Aufmuth says. “Every €10 [about $11.70 U.S.] means another person can finally see.”
Glasses are made on the ground, not shipped in. They sell for the equivalent of two to three days’ local wages – about five euros in Malawi, four in India.
“In Malawi, that’s roughly the price of a local chicken,” he notes.
The stories Aufmuth collects tend to be small in scale and large in their consequences. A 10-year-old boy in a Brazilian favela looked up at his mother through his first pair of glasses and said, “Ah, so that’s what you look like.” A teacher in Bolivia could finally read her students’ work again, and read aloud to her grandchild for the first time. A woman near Lake Titicaca, on the Peru-Bolivia border, could once again sort her seed potatoes. A Brazilian açaí farmer no longer had to climb every tree just to check ripeness, and a grandmother in the Amazon who sews clothes for an extended family of 56 grandchildren got her work back.
“If a farmer can’t see properly, yields drop,” Aufmuth says. “In Malawi, that might mean three months of hunger instead of two.”
Half of GoodVision’s work, he says, is education and outreach – training local technicians not just to assemble the frames but also to run basic vision tests. In India, mobile teams of mostly young women travel to remote villages six days a week and currently distribute 6,000 pairs of glasses each month. In Brazil’s Paraná state, the organization tested 300,000 schoolchildren in a few months in partnership with public health systems, an effort he calls a “mammoth operation.”
The work has now expanded into more complicated care. In India and Burkina Faso, GoodVision helps coordinate cataract surgeries, including the transport and funding patients would otherwise never afford.
“We realized,” Aufmuth says, “that many had never been to a hospital – not even once.”
A million pairs of glasses sounds like a lot, and Aufmuth does not let himself rest on it.
“A million glasses sounds like a lot,” he says. “But compared to the need, it’s very little.”
He is more interested in what comes next than in the running total – stitching the local efforts into national health systems, then into the global ones, so the model scales without losing its grip on the people on the ground.
“What drives me is fairness – the idea that everyone should have the chance to see, to learn, to work,” he says.
And to anyone who tells him the problem is too big for one person to chip at, he has an answer ready.
“People often say one person can’t make a difference,” he says. “That’s just an excuse. You have to start something, set it in motion.”
