Babatunde Bale
Student and Volunteer in Benin City, Nigeria
Babatunde is an undergraduate of Optometry at the University of Benin. Babatunde has over 3 years of experience in volunteering and leading interventions focused on strengthening community eye healthcare. Currently, Babatunde is the Administrative Coordinator at The R.E.T.I.N.A Initiative, where he focuses on promoting primary eye care services in underserved African communities through awareness, medical outreach programmes, trainings and other innovative measures to eradicate preventable blindness.
He led a team of other young leaders to develop the first-ever First Aid Eye Kit in Nigeria. An ultra-modern safety health pack that contains specific resources (e.g., sterile saline eyewash, safety goggles, etc.) that manages emergency eye injuries and facilitate prompt referral. This has been able to train over 400 students and teachers on how to respond quickly to emergency eye injuries, which has reduced sports-related blindness by 60% in 3 high schools.
He has organized community-based intervention projects like MobEye Clinic and World Glaucoma Week, in which free cataract surgery was provided to poor community members that were on the verge of becoming blind. Through this, over 200 beneficiaries have achieved more than 85% improvement of functional vision, which is enabling them to work better and live their normal lives with good eyesight.
For his exemplary display of leadership, he emerged as one of the top three winners of the OD Impact Challenge 2021, a global competition that seeks to recognize and support the effort of young changemakers that are actively solving a problem and improving the lives of others in their community.
Babatunde is a UN SDG student ambassador of the Millennium Fellowship (Boston, USA). An HarvardX fellow with a focus on Strengthening Community Health Workers Program. An alumnus of Clinton Global Initiative University founded by former U.S. President Bill Clinton. Babatunde is committed to ensuring that access to basic healthcare is equally distributed and affordable to everyone.