Vula is free for use by health workers and is rendered sustainable through a variety of funding mechanisms. In 2016 Vula won the Clearly Vision Prize, conceived by Clearly campaign founder and investor James Chen, which sought out startups designed to hack what it calls “the number one unaddressed disability in the world – poor vision”. Vula also partners with companies wanting to improve eye health and since 2022 has been working with Novartis to improve eye care referral systems in African countries. Commenting on the partnership, Racey Muchilwa, Head of Sub-Saharan Africa, (SSA), at Novartis said, “There’s a clear scarcity of general eye care specialists in SSA – a 2019 study further shows that there are 2.7 ophthalmologists per million population in SSA. This intervention will help use the limited resources by connecting primary healthcare workers with patients.

Vula was originally known as “Catar-App,” or “Vul-Amehlo” (Nguni for open your eyes). Mapham came up with the idea while serving in Swaziland’s Good Shepherd Hospital under the guidance of rural healthcare outreach guru and fellow ophthalmologist, Dr Jonathan Pons.

His modest aim was to apply his knack for technology to the common cell phone to help bring vision to cataract-blinded patients in rural Eswatini by enabling easier referral for high quality, life-changing eye surgery. Vula means ‘open’ in Siswati, Xhosa and Zulu (Nguni grouping of languages), and the app enables health workers anywhere in the country to assess eye patients in remote consultation with an eye health specialist.

They can carry out a vision test, photograph the eye, and go through a checklist of symptoms. Once these details are uploaded, a specialist miles away can offer a diagnosis, recommend treatment, or book an appointment at a specialist centre.

In the years since its birth as an eye app, news of Vula’s utility spread like wildfire across Sub- Saharan healthcare systems where patients are fundamentally challenged by poverty, transport, and high levels of basic healthcare ignorance. By the time Covid hit South Africa in March 2020, it was sufficiently embedded across the country to save scores, if not hundreds of lives via quick referrals of infected patients to appropriate care.

Dr Faried Abdullah, a Covid specialist and Director of AIDS and TB Research at the SA Medical Research Council, set a new record of handling 125 referrals on Vula in one day, while performing his daily ward rounds. The app addresses a need for instant advice, patient information, and consultation so basic and enormous that it’s ubiquity across all disciplines today is unsurprising.

National Department of Health former Deputy Director General, Dr Yogan Pillay, describes Vula as “the glue that holds the health system together and the oil that makes it run efficiently.”

Mapham revealed yesterday that the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness, (IAPB), this month accepted his membership in recognition of his work with Vula.

The IAPB goals include multiple measures to ensure that by 2030 no one experiences unnecessary or preventable sight loss and everyone can reach their full potential, that eye care and rehabilitation services are accessible, inclusive and affordable wherever needed, and that people understand the importance of caring for their own eye health and that they demand access to services, “free from the weight of any social stigma.”

· Contact support@vulamobile.com to get started on Vula.

Medbrief article by written by Chris Batman