Founded in 1982, Seva Canada Society (Seva) works to prevent and reverse blindness in developing countries. An estimated 36 million people around the world are blind, including 19 million children. Seva-supported research has found that most of the world’s blind are women and girls. Seva treats vision issues by offering glasses, medicine, and eye surgery to those in need.

Seva operates in 13 countries: Benin, Burundi, Cambodia, Congo-Brazzaville, Egypt, Ethiopia, Guatemala, India, Madagascar, Malawi, Nepal, Tanzania, and Tibetan areas of China. In F2019, Seva-partner hospitals and eye camps performed 85% of Seva's total surgeries in Nepal. 10% of surgeries were performed in Cambodia and the rest were spread amongst the other countries. Similarly, 85% of people screened were in Nepal. 

Seva partners with people in remote areas to create and staff Community Eye Centres. Training sessions help doctors to learn modern surgery procedures to treat glaucoma and cataracts. Most patients pay a small amount for the surgery. The money collected allows the eye centres to provide free care to the poorest patients. Seva Canada does not receive the fees for service because the individual eye centres use them in continued operations.  

Seva Canada is a Medium-sized charity, receiving $2m in donations and special event revenue in F2019. The charity also received donated goods-in-kind worth $4k in F2019, $46k in F2018, and $3k in F2017.

Administrative costs are 9% of revenues and fundraising costs are 13% of donations. For every dollar donated, 78 cents go the cause. This is within Ci’s reasonable range for overhead spending. Funding reserves of $394k can cover 3.3 months of annual program costs.

This charity report is an update that has been sent to Seva Canada for review. Changes and edits may be forthcoming.

Updated on June 10, 2020 by Tenzin Shomar.