The Company
"Peek Vision is a social enterprise which works to bring better vision and health to everyone. We develop technology and partnerships to create sustainable access to eye care. Peek solutions are cost-effective and portable, so they can reach people in remote and rural areas.
Peek is a hybrid organization which consists of two entities. The Peek Vision Foundation is a registered charity in the UK. The Foundation wholly owns a trading company, Peek Vision Ltd, which is a legal manufacturer of medical devices and develops products to bring eye care to people worldwide.
All profits generated by the company’s activities ultimately belong to the Foundation. The Foundation uses its funds to build eye care capacity in low- and middle-income countries by supporting people, knowledge, and tools."
(from peekvision.org)
My Role
Out of the 7 countries Peek was based in at the time: Rwanda, Pakistan, Botswana, India, Kenya, Indonesia, and Zimbabwe and the UK; I chose to work in Botswana for the summer of 2018.
Due to the nature of the work, the schedule the team had in Botswana could change at any moment. They were reliant on outside partners on some projects, so occasionally the priorities of a project would need to shift. Since this was the case, I started my internship with a 2-week information gathering period. I interviewed the other employees and read the materials they gave me. Then at the end of the two weeks, I submited a project proposal for something I wanted to work on this summer that would be suitable for my skillset and beneficial to Peek and the Botswana-UPenn Partnership (BUP).
My proposal included two projects: a short research-based project analyzing the public health posters currently in Botswana and make recommendations for posters and eye care material they planned on distributing and a long-term project I would start and hand off at the end of my internship. This long-term project was paired with their current initiative to give free eye care screenings to all school children in Botswana. I helped plan the inclusion of children with disabilities who were unable to attend schools due to the lack of accommodations the schools could provide.
In the early 2000s, Botswana's government made some serious strides in the inclusion of people with disabilities, and there are some amazing schools that offer accommodations; however, there was still a huge social stigma that caused many families to choose not to keep their child in school.
To learn everything I could about this population of people and the resources available to them. I called local schools for children with disabilities or schools that had dedicated classrooms for special education and even visited a few. The photo on the left is from The Camphill School in Nota, where they offer a boarding school and vocational training for children and young adults.
This process as well as holding a design thinking workshop with the Botswana Peek team, helped give lots of insight to the problem
The Outcome
At the end of this internship, I produced new materials as an example of pamphlets and posters they could hand out; as well as a lecture on graphic design and design principals to make the posters easy to comprehend and eye-catching. They plan on handing out color books on good eye care habits for children as an initiative to get children to become health advocates for their families.
Additionally, I submitted a proposal for the inclusion of children with disabilities in their national school eye care program, called Pono Yame. Unfortunately, I cannot include that work in my portfolio.
Lastly, another colleague and I, while in Botswana, wrote, edited and submitted a video for the APHA film competition linked below.
