Twenty years ago, I walked into the World Bank convinced I had solved a problem affecting 2.2 billion people. I was wrong about the solution — but right about the problem, and it took a two-year rejection to teach me the difference.
I had invested heavily in adjustable-power lenses that I believed were a game-changer for low-income countries. The World Bank wasn’t convinced. After two years of lobbying, I got a crushing no.
Most donors would have called that the end of the idea. I treated it as the beginning of a different one. Rather than retreating, I absorbed that failure and launched Vision for a Nation, a charity built to test whether universal eyecare could work at national scale — starting in Rwanda, a country eyecare professionals at the time insisted couldn’t support it.
By taking on the full financial risk myself, training 2,700 local nurses, and conducting screenings across all 15,000 of Rwanda’s villages, we built a national health model that proved the skeptics wrong. Rwanda became the first country in the world with universal access to affordable vision correction.
Philanthropy has always been judged less by intention than by outcome — and today, as public trust in institutions frays, that scrutiny has never been sharper. The debate is no longer just about whether the rich are giving back, but what it achieves — whether it’s truly moving the needle on a social or environmental issue or if it is merely funding safe, low-risk projects, such as eponymous hospital wings or alma mater donations, for quiet recognition.
