Orbis

Many years before the establishment of the Aumund Foundation, Franz-Walter Aumund was fascinated by the flying eye hospital which he had read about in a newspaper article. As a frequent flyer he spent decades travelling the globe, and was impressed by the idea of bringing an eye clinic with the latest standard of equipment to people who urgently need ophthalmological help, for the time it takes to provide it.

Several years passed, and we started to work with Orbis UK in 2020, but even then we were unable to support the operations on board the Flying Eye Hospital because this was not possible during the pandemic.

Instead the Aumund Foundation supported the REACH programme in Nepal from 2020 to 2022. The Orbis project team visited more than 300,000 children in their homes and schools over this period, in order to detect, treat and to prevent as many problems as possible by early examination.

In 2023 it finally happened. We were one of the large project sponsors of a three-week training and operation mission of the Flying Eye Hospital in Zambia and are now looking forward to an expansion of our partnership.

In 2024, the foundation stone was laid for a long-term project by Aumund Foundation and Orbis in Bangladesh, which will be implemented from 2025 to 2028: “See the future” in Ghana.

From 2025 to 2028, Aumund Foundation and Orbis will bring together educational and healthcare systems in Ghana to provide eye screenings for approximately 675.000 children, teachers and community members in 20 districts in the Ashanti and Greater Accra regions. Partnering with the Ghana Education Service, Ghana Health Service, and others, the project will implement a national Primary Eye Care strategy based on Orbis’s acclaimed Ghana SOARS model. Activities include training health workers, teachers and ophthalmic nurses, equipping 26 secondary facilities and two tertiary hospitals, and providing residential paediatric observerships in India to strengthen Ghana’s eye care network and ensure long-term impact