Kibuye Hope Eye Unit

Burundi is a war-torn land struggling to provide healthcare for its people. The Serge Burundi-Kibuye team has partnered with Hope Africa University in Burundi to help meet this need through compassionate, skilled medical care and training national healthcare professionals.

Currently, the only Burundian eye surgeons are located in the capital city. Dr. John Cropsey, one of six doctors on the team, is a board-certified ophthalmologist with 12 years of life experience in Sub-Saharan Africa. His passion is to see eye care in Burundi transformed through training national eye-care providers. Eighty percent of all blindness is either reversible or preventable. Giving the gift of sight to the blind is consistently found to be one of the most cost-effective interventions in all of medicine.

Hope Africa University’s main teaching hospital, Kibuye Hope Hospital, is poised to become the leading center of eye care and training for this region of Africa. Your gift to this project can help make that a reality.

Goals of the Project:
1) Develop the physical infrastructure necessary to provide care for 15,000 ophthalmology outpatients per year and to perform 2,000 eye surgeries per year. This will require:

• One operating room outfitted for two surgeons,
• Three exam rooms with slit lamp microscopes,
• A 30-bed inpatient ward,
• Vehicles for community eye clinics and remote surgical camps.

2) Develop the human resources needed to operate a tertiary eye unit. This will require:

• investing in the training of 15 eye-specific staff ranging from patient attendants to ophthalmology residents.

Estimated Cost: $171,200

For more information about this project, please contact Dr. Cropsey at johncropsey@gmail.com.