In early May, Essilor held its fourth annual Eye Mitra convention in Uttar Pradesh, India, bringing together its growing community of young vision care entrepreneurs. The one-day event united 1,000 Eye Mitra from across India to share experiences, celebrate the massive scaling up of the program over the past 12 months and explore future initiatives to expand vision care to underserved communities.

Essilor created the Eye Mitra program in 2013 and now has a network of 2,600 Eye Mitra primary vision care providers across 14 provinces in India. Together they have screened more than 4.8 million people and equipped nearly 1million individuals with affordable eyeglasses. Essilor and its partners aim to train a total of 10,000 young Indian men and women as primary vision care providers by 2020.