Our year at a glance

As you will see from this report, 2024 was a year of significant achievements for The Fred Hollows Foundation NZ. So please accept my sincere thanks to our donors, partners, stakeholders, staff in New Zealand and the Pacific and my fellow Trustees - for helping support the future that Fred wanted; an end to avoidable blindness.

I’m delighted to welcome our newest Board Member, Lisa Tai, Chief Operating Officer at Pasifika Medical Association Group, who was appointed at the end of February 2025. Hailing from Fiji, Lisa brings with her a vast array of valuable experience in Pacific leadership, health, and partnerships.

Reflecting on the year, the highlight for me was the groundbreaking ceremony for the new Centre for Eye Health in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea (PNG). Our local partners showed incredible leadership in facilitating this event, with representatives from the Governments of PNG, New Zealand and Australia, and other dignitaries all gathering to celebrate this significant milestone.

This ceremony was the culmination and celebration of years of hard work by The Foundation and our partners to address the significant need for more eye care in PNG. This facility, when completed, will be a core part of PNG's eye health strategy and dramatically increase the training of the PNG eye care workforce into the future.

While this year we provided scholarships for five University of Papua New Guinea trainee eye doctors – a particularly large intake, the aim for the Centre is to have at least two eye doctors graduating annually - supporting the strengthening of sustainable eye health services countrywide.

A huge thank you to everyone involved in getting the project to this point. Over the next 18 months we are now tasked with getting it built and operating, for a target opening of August 2026.

Last year we also celebrated an accolade for our reporting, with our Performance Report winning the Sustainability Award at the New Zealand For Purpose Reporting Awards 2024. This is the seventh award The Foundation has received for our annual reporting, which is testament to the significant amount of work and pride the team put into the report each year.

This was the first time we included a section dedicated towards sustainability. This was included as part of our journey to adopt a formal framework for Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) reporting so we can ensure sustainability is embedded across our organisation. It is fantastic to have won the Sustainability Award in recognition of this effort.

We have some amazing work underway in this space, including the Building Community-level Climate Resilience (BCCR) project. This project involves carrying out Climate Impact Assessments of Foundation-supported eye clinics in PNG, Vanuatu and Solomon Islands to identify the high-level climate change impacts, risks and mitigation measures. We will share the findings in 2025 in the hopes of building the knowledge and skills on health and climate to support greater climate resilience in the Pacific.

Fred said, “The great challenges are to be part of setting up structures that will go on when each one of our individual biological lives no longer exist”. While these highlights only scratch the surface of the achievements of the past year, they start to illustrate how, more than 30 years later, we are continuing Fred’s legacy and providing long-term solutions that will provide lasting, meaningful benefits to communities in the Pacific. Roll on 2025 and more positive impact!

We are delighted to close out another year on a high note, with 2024 having been one of our best performing years in which we have continued to strengthen and grow our programmes. This year alone we have performed with our partners 68,078 consultations, 5,125 surgeries, and led 129 outreaches to remote communities across the Pacific.

We simply wouldn’t be able to accomplish this transformational work without the generous support of our donors and partners; be that individuals, families, charitable trusts and foundations, corporate partners, institutions, governments, and academia – all of whom share our vision of a world in which no person is needlessly blind or vision impaired.

As the second year of executing Our 2023 – 2032 Strategy, we remain focused on strengthening entire eye health systems, building the local eye care workforce and improving accessibility through inclusive care and evidence-based planning. This year, alongside our Pacific partners, we’ve made significant strides.

We saw the graduation of three fully qualified eye doctors, six trainee eye doctors and 22 fully qualified eye nurses. It is also encouraging to see an increase in enrolments, with 38 students enrolled for 2025, one of the highest intakes in the last 10 years.

Samoa and Papua New Guinea (PNG) launched their first National Eye Care Plans, which are designed to guide the planning, implementation, management and evaluation of eye care in these countries; integrating eye care within the broader healthcare framework and ensuring resources are directed where they’re most needed.

The State of Eye Health Research Programme continues to gather vital information on eye health in the Pacific. This includes the completion of the first-ever Rapid Assessment of Avoidable Blindness (RAAB) survey in Samoa, and the release of the Vanuatu RAAB survey results. A RAAB survey provides critical data on the causes of blindness and barriers to eye care, helping guide future eye health planning. Plans are now underway for a RAAB survey in Tonga in 2025, with funds also being sought for a Kiribati survey.

The Madang Eye Clinic team in PNG partnered with local disability organisation, Creative Self Help, to conduct the first outreach to include the collection of data for eye patients with disabilities. This marks a stride towards our goal of providing quality and inclusive eye care by integrating Gender Equality, Disability and Social Inclusion (GEDSI) activities into our programmes.

These achievements together with our learnings, set the platform for another positive year of working hand in hand with our Pacific partners to drive the transformation of eye care systems and improve eye health services for all.

On behalf of Team Fred, I would also like to acknowledge the legacy of a very special team member who left our organisation at the end of 2024 after 17 years of service. Agnes Mor, General Manager at the Madang Eye Clinic, joined the clinic in 2007 when it was just her, an eye doctor, and a couple of others. Under her watchful guidance and support, 141 eye nurses have since been trained, leaving a legacy for eye care in PNG and improving the lives of so many.

Finally, from all of us at The Fred Hollows Foundation NZ, thank you for being part of this journey. Together, we’re closing gaps in eye care, reaching the most underserved communities, and ensuring accessible eye care for all.

When I started with The Foundation more than two decades ago there was only a handful of eye doctors and eye nurses in the Pacific region. Now, six of the key countries where we work have at least one eye doctor, supported by a team of eye nurses in their clinics. Fiji and Papua New Guinea (PNG) are leading the way with a dozen or more eye doctors having graduated or in training, and hundreds of eye nurses. This is a great achievement that I am, and Fred would have been, immensely proud of.

But what keeps me going is that there is still more work to do. Diabetic eye diseases, degenerative conditions such as cataracts, and limited access to eye care continue to threaten the sight of people across the Pacific. Fred knew that training just one eye doctor could have a huge impact, because they could go on to train hundreds more clinicians. That’s why we continue to focus on working with our partners to equip local people with the skills, knowledge and tools they need to deliver life-changing eye care in their own communities.

In 2024, we made significant strides in strengthening our existing workforce through ongoing skills training and education opportunities. We conducted 27 individual workforce support visits across the Pacific and provided tailored eye health training activities, including a Pacific National Eye Coordination Workshop in New Zealand; Manual Small Incision Cataract Surgery (MSICS) Training Workshops in Fiji and PNG; and Ophthalmic Instrument Maintenance Training in Fiji. These courses are designed to foster local expertise and create a highly skilled and experienced local workforce.

Outreaches not only provide essential eyecare services to underserved communities but also serve as vital training grounds for student eye doctors and nurses, as they can gain hands-on experience while addressing complex eye conditions under the guidance of experienced ophthalmologists. A great example of this was the surgical outreach to Alotau, in the Milne Bay Province of PNG. The visiting team included three eye doctors, four eye nurses, and support staff – including Ophthalmology Registrar Dr Evelyn Agebigo. The team composition meant the travelling doctors could work alongside the local eye nurses, providing support and skills transfer to help build a strong local eye care workforce. During their time in Alotau, the team screened and treated a large number of people, with a total of 1,626 patient consultations and 193 surgeries.

Another wonderful illustration of our Pacific eye care community working together is the World Sight Day celebrations. With a special focus on children's eye health, our teams held community events, free eye screenings, and school visits to raise awareness and ensure that children across the Pacific have access to the eye care they need to thrive. World Sight Day serves as a reminder that good vision is essential for children’s education, development, and well-being. While our teams work tirelessly every day to provide accessible, inclusive, and affordable eye care, these annual activities help reach even more children and families across the Pacific.

A notable feature of 2024 was The Foundation’s continued drive for collective change. Fred was able to achieve a lot by going out and doing something about the problems he could see, and we have been able to achieve even more by coming together to carry his work on. Every donation, every individual’s support, every person we partner with, and every employee, has a part to play as we work together to end avoidable blindness and vision impairment in the Pacific. Thank you all for your generosity and commitment to the work we do.

Finally, I would like to pay special tribute to Dr Telaite Biu, who has been a member of the team at the Pacific Eye Institute since 2009 – working as Director of the Institute and Lead Ophthalmologist for diabetes eye care.

Dr Biu is regarded as a true pioneer, and the mother of Pacific ophthalmology, having worked in the field for over 30 years and led the response to diabetes in Fiji - training eye care professionals from around the Pacific and providing diabetes eye screening and treatment for thousands of patients.

Her dedication has transformed lives and inspired many, and in her retirement, she leaves behind a legacy of compassion, leadership, and mentorship. Thank you, Dr Biu, for being an inspiration to eye care service providers in Fiji and the Pacific.