SEVA Canada is a top-rated 5-star and high-impact charity. This excellent charity has an A grade in results reporting, meaning it does a great job reporting its activities and their results. The charity also has reasonable overhead spending and is financially transparent. 

Founded in 1982, Seva Canada Society (Seva) works to prevent and reverse blindness in developing countries. An estimated 43 million people around the world are blind. Seva reports that 30 million children experience some form of visual impairment and two million are blind. Seva-supported research has found that more of the world’s blind are women and girls. In fact, women and girls are 12% more likely to have vision loss and 8% more likely to be blind. Seva treats vision issues by offering glasses, medicine, and eye surgeries (mainly cataract and glaucoma) to those in need.

Seva operates in 12 countries: Burundi, Cambodia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Francophone West Africa, Guatemala, India, Madagascar, Malawi, Nepal, Tanzania, and Tibet.

In F2021, Seva-partner hospitals and eye camps performed 54,902 cataract surgeries (54% women and 46% men) and 3,240 glaucoma and other surgeries. Seva also provided 3,602 people with prescription glasses.

Seva partners with people in remote areas to create and staff Community Eye Centres. Training sessions help doctors learn modern surgery procedures to treat glaucoma and cataracts. In F2020, three ophthalmologists received retina and glaucoma training, one received cataract surgical training, and one doctor received ophthalmology training. Most patients pay a small fee for the surgery. The money collected allows the eye centers to provide free care to the poorest patients. Seva Canada does not receive the fees for these procedures because the individual eye centers use them for continued operations. 

Seva received $2.2m in donations and special event revenue in F2021.

Administrative costs are 6% of revenues and fundraising costs are 11% of donations. This results in overhead spending of 17%. For every dollar donated, 83 cents go to the cause. This is within Ci’s reasonable range for overhead spending. Funding reserves of $1.1m can cover around 11 months program costs at the F2021 level.

Charity Intelligence has sent this profile update to Seva Canada for review. Changes and edits may be forthcoming.

Updated on June 3, 2022 by Emily Downing.