VISION magazine was privileged to speak with one of the most influential voices in global eye care.
Professor Kovin Naidoo is the Global Head of Advocacy and Partnerships at the OneSight EssilorLuxottica Foundation and former CEO of the Brien Holden Vision Institute. A Fulbright Scholar, Ashoka Fellow, and Honorary Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, he served on the editorial committee of the 2019 WHO World Report on Vision and is co-founder of the African Vision Research Institute and the Global Myopia Awareness Coalition as well as the Global Optomery Public Health Alliance(GOPHA). Having received a Honorary Doctorate from the State University of New York
for his humanitarian work, he was twice recognised as Optometrist of the Year regionally and internationally. He has dedicated his professional life to delivering eye care to people in need.
1.Why did you choose optometry as a career?
Optometry was my second choice. I was going to study medicine after my BSc. When I informed my comrades in SASCO that I had a provisional place and was going to go out of the province and leave UDW (now UKZN), they reminded me that as president of the SRC, I had insisted that the collective must decide. So they asked me to sit aside and had a discussion, after which they decided that I cannot leave. I then desperately tried to get into optometry or psychology as time was running out. I managed to get into optometry, and I have not regretted it. It is the best decision others have taken for me!
2. What are your special areas of interest in optometry?
Ocular Disease and Public Health. I was blessed to get a Fulbright Scholarship to the US and studied for an OD during the day and a master’s in public health at night. This helped me to develop my skills in my key areas of passion.
3. What would you like to change in optometry?
I would like our profession to be more entrenched in the public sector, not for refractions only, but as clinicians who provide comprehensive eye care including refraction as well as ocular disease screening, diagnosis and treatment. I would also like to see more optometrists serve in a public health leadership role so that we can influence policy and also create greater access for our people. Optometrists should be more proactive to ensure that our scope of care is fully implemented in the public sector. I would also like to see more of us frame the therapeutic debate from a public health and access creation perspective. I often ask optometrists in the public sector and in professional leadership, “Why are you not using the data to make a case? The cataract surgical rate is declining, and we have ophthalmologists coming to work in the public sector, treating vernal conjunctivitis. This is a travesty of justice, as access to health care is a basic human right, and professional politics should not determine the scope and role of professions.
4. Who has inspired you the most?
I have two individuals: Dr. Neil Aggett, a white South African who forego his privileged life and as a doctor dedicated his life to the struggle and placed health and human rights at the center of his professional and ethical compass. He was tortured and murdered in police detention.
The other person is Prof. Brien Holden, who showed me that intellectualism, caring, and science can all converge in one human being.
5. How did you get involved with the Brien Holden institute?
It has been 11 years since I lost a friend, colleague, and mentor, Prof. Brien Holden. I dearly miss the laughter, intellectual banter, and jointly striving for a better world that characterised our relationship. The first conference I presented at was in Korea when I had just started my career. I presented about the challenges in Africa and the need for the optometry profession to be more people-centered. It was not well received, as most discourse was about protecting the profession and not about protecting the profession while serving humanity. Prof. Holden quoted me the next day. We had dinner, and at dinner he asked me what I was planning to do. I indicated that now that I had returned from the US, I planned to set up an NGO and build community programs. He suggested that we do it together. We then set up the International Centre for Eye Care Education, which later became the Brien Holden Vision Institute.
6. What is the best advice you have received?
Be humble. Support others on your way up, as one day they will become your partners and collaborators and grow your career even more. Therefore, my mantra is “Partner or Perish.
7. What advice would you give to an optometry student?
Investigate different areas of practice, be it academia, public health, the private sector, or management. Choose the area that best suits your skills. Don’t assume that going into private practice is your only option.
8. How do you cope through adversity?
I think I was forced to learn to deal with adversity. I lost my mom at 14 years, got expelled for politics from school at 15, had numerous brushes with the law, spent months every year underground, spent 8 months in solitary confinement, was banned and house arrested for more than a year, and had to report daily to a police station. Later in life I lost my dad and then my sister, who I was very close to, and this was devastating. All of these experiences forced me to learn to deal with adversity. Throughout all of this I always reminded myself that there are people who do not have anyone at all and some have no food to eat, and in comparison I am privileged.
9. How do you want to be remembered?
As someone who cared for others irrespective of their race, religion, or class. But nowadays, having 5-, 7-, and 8-year-olds has added to my perspective, and I would also like to be remembered as a great dad.
