As Ghana works toward the United Nations (UN’s) 2030 eye health targets, the infrastructure built by a Takoradi-based optometrist offers a model for what locally driven professional leadership can achieve.
Dr. Jerome Emmanuel Abaka-Cann is the first Ghanaian Special Category Fellow of the American Academy of Optometry, and the architect of the country’s most widely adopted eye care digital system.
Accra, Ghana is ranked second in the world for glaucoma prevalence. An estimated 600,000 Ghanaians are affected by the disease, of whom roughly 30,000 are at risk of going blind if left untreated. Across all forms of visual impairment, the Ghana Health Service (GHS) estimates that about 95 per cent of Ghanaians who need spectacles do not have access to them. The professionals best placed to address this gap, optometrists, number around 500 in a country of 33 million, with nearly half concentrated in the Greater Accra Region.
Against this backdrop, the work of Dr. Jerome Emmanuel Abaka-Cann represents a case study in what locally driven professional infrastructure can achieve when built with both clinical rigour and deliberate national reach. In 2011, Dr. Abaka-Cann opened his first eye clinic in Takoradi and simultaneously conceived and built the Facility Overall Versatile Eyecare Application, (FOVEA) Ghana’s first optometry-specific electronic medical record system.
Fourteen years later, FOVEA has undergone seven major version updates and is in continuous operation across 71 facilities verified by the Ghana Optometric Association, spanning multiple regions and practice types. The majority of those facilities are independently owned, with no financial, ownership, or management connection to Dr. Abaka-Cann. They adopted the system voluntarily, on its clinical merits alone, and have built their practice infrastructure around it for over a decade without commercial promotion or institutional mandate. The system’s Research Assistant Module supports longitudinal patient data collection and structured clinical reporting, providing Ghana’s optometric sector with a research-capable backbone that feeds the kind of evidence required to inform national eye health policy. This aligns directly with the UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) on universal health coverage and the World Health Organisation (WHO) targets to increase effective coverage of refractive error care and cataract surgery by 2030.
In November 2024, Dr. Abaka-Cann’s contributions to Ghana’s eye care infrastructure were recognised when he became the first Ghanaian optometrist inducted as a Special Category Fellow of the American Academy of Optometry (AAO), one of only two Africans to hold this distinction at that time, alongside Nigerian Navy Commander and optometrist Dr. Tamunominabo Edah.
Founded in 1922, the AAO is the world’s foremost professional organisation for optometric excellence, with more than 4,000 Fellows across 70 countries. Its Special Category Fellowship is reserved for practitioners who have transformed the profession through sustained leadership and systemic impact, the rarest of its distinctions. His fellowship report documented FOVEA’s development and national rollout, his clinic network spanning communities across multiple regions, his residency training programme, his community outreach work, and his leadership roles within the Ghana Optometric Association, including Regional Executive and Acting Zonal President for the Western Zone.
The recognition was followed immediately by a deepening of his role in continental professional development. Appointed to the executive of the AAO African Chapter, a body of over 800 optometrists across more than 20 African countries and 110 Fellows, Dr. Abaka-Cann designed and delivered mentorship programmes and continental webinars that reached over 150 African optometrists seeking fellowship.
In 2025, he served as a Structured Oral Examination evaluator, the only Ghanaian and only Special Category Fellow on the panel. The outcome was a continental record: 35 new African Fellows inducted in a single year, including three Special Category Fellows, two of them Ghanaian. He was also selected for the AAO Flom Leadership Academy, reserved for fewer than 40 of the Academy’s 4,000-plus Fellows annually, and the Clinical Investigative Course, a selective programme for Fellows developing research leadership within the profession.
His facilities serve as training sites for optometry students from KNUST and the University of Cape Coast, and for opticians from the Optical Technician Training Institute, with approximately 10 emerging professionals in supervised practice each year. His network runs Ghana’s largest private pre-registration optometry residency programme, maintaining a 100 percent Ghana Board Examination pass rate since 2022. In 2020, he established the Imperial Eye Award at KNUST for the best graduating research optometrist, investing in the evidence base that Ghana’s eye health system requires.
His network, operating under Imperial Eye Care Centre and Indigo Eye Care, is Ghana’s largest private eye care group and the largest private optometry network in West Africa by number of facilities, with a combined catchment population of 3.7 million people verified by the Ghana Statistical Service.
“Ghana cannot meet its 2030 eye health commitments without building professionals who are trained to international standards, and without digital systems that make clinical data visible at the population level,” Dr. Abaka-Cann said and added that “Both things are possible with Ghanaian leadership, Ghanaian resources, and a long enough horizon. That is what we have been building.”
Source:
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