Exclusive Interview with Dr. Clements, former ophthalmologist at SOLE Boa Vista clinic, Benguela, Angola
Fondation CBM Luxembourg formed a new partnership with SOLE Boa Vista clinic in January 2026. Having conducted a successful pilot project in 2025, CBM has established a longer term collaboration with the clinic covering support in several key aspects of eye health.
Located in Benguela, approximately 500km from the capital Luanda, SOLE Boa Vista conducts 3,000 cataract surgeries per year, with 25% coming from outreach program, where medical staff visit rural provinces. In these campaigns, staff travel to remote areas and offer screenings as well as operations, allowing people to access treatment without needing to travel to Benguela.
Dr. John Clements is a long-standing mentor for CBM Luxembourg. Based in Portland USA, he spent several years working at Boa Vista and acts as consultant to the clinic. We spoke to him about CBM’s collaboration with Boa Vista and the impact for the people of Angola.
1. Dr. Clements, thank you for agreeing to be interviewed. Can you tell us a little about what brought you to work in Angola and subsequently stay in touch?
My wife and I both felt a special calling towards international missions work and so I entered medical school with the idea of becoming a missionary ophthalmologist. 9 years later I was finishing a fellowship at Harvard Medical School and my wife Lori asked me if I was serious about living as a missionary doctor. It was not an easy decision as there were many other opportunities, but I remained faithful to that original calling. We contacted some organizations and discovered the SOLE Boa Vista clinic which needed for a full-time ophthalmologist. We lived and worked there, with our 3 small children without ever having visited Angola from 2011 to 2014.
While there we established the first training program at Boa Vista for cataract surgeons. I also completed ≈9,000 surgeries, and trained ≈20 ophthalmic nurses. It was very difficult, challenging, yet rewarding, work. In 2014 an opportunity arose at the Casey Eye Institute, Oregon Health Science University (OHSU) (a major academic center on the west coast of the United States). I had encountered difficulties related to my status as a “missionary” doctor without academic resources or status. So, I took the position at OHSU with the idea that being a professor at a major academic center would open possibilities for international work. In this context I serve as a consultant and visit Angola once or twice annually.
2. Tell us more about the SOLE Boa Vista clinic. Why is their outreach work so important in Angola?
Angola is a country of ≈39 million. When Boa Vista was founded in the early 1990’s, it was the only clinic in the entire country that offered high quality cataract surgery at a price the general public could afford. There are many social disparities in Angola, the rich few can have very good health care at private clinics, but these are extremely expensive and not realistic for the majority of the population. Boa Vista established a network of churches with affiliated health clinics where Boa Vista could train and station nurses that would diagnose persons with blinding cataracts. For those patients with means to travel to the base clinic in Benguela, they get cataract surgery. For those unable to travel, the nurses would collect a list of patients and Boa Vista would send a mobile team to complete the cataract surgeries. This work has been vital to fighting against avoidable blindness in Angola.
The cataract surgery rate in Angola is very low compared to western nations; 20x the number of cataract surgeries are performed in the United States annually compared to most of Sub-Saharan Africa. There are many factors to this, but certainly one of those is the number of trained cataract surgeons. In High Income Countries there are approximately 76 Ophthalmologists per million population; however, in Low Income Countries such as Angola, there are only 4 Ophthalmologists per million population: An astounding disparity. Boa Vista is partnering to help change that through training eye care professionals.
3. CBM Luxembourg sponsors entry-level nurse training for 10 nurses at SOLE Boa Vista. Why is this training important, what problem does it help solve?
Due to the great lack of ophthalmologists in Angola, there is an enormous amount of work to do to meet the countries vision needs. Training mid-level providers, such as nurses, helps to meet basic eye care needs. These providers can perform basic eye health consultations, treat basic disease and diagnose conditions that need to be sent to specialists for surgery or higher-level medical care.
4. CBM has purchased a new EyeMobil Innovations microscope for SOLE Boa Vista, for use at the clinic. How will it help?
After some years of not training doctors regularly in cataract surgery, Boa Vista has partnered with the local government hospital which has an academic residency program. The government hospital does academics well, but has difficulty providing adequate surgical training; an area Boa Vista does very well and so trainees from the government hospital train in surgery at Boa Vista.
The new microscope will improve the conditions at Boa Vista to teach cataract surgery, providing a visualization system that has a “teaching” scope, allowing the surgical teacher to see exactly what the learning surgeon is seeing at the same time. This new microscope also has a video recording system, which is used to record surgeries so learners can watch their surgeries and teachers can go back and correct any mistakes that may have occurred during surgery. This is routine practice in training programs in High Income Countries, but is not yet being employed in Angola.
5. CBM Luxembourg has signed a 3-year Memorandum of Understanding to collaborate with and support SOLE Boa Vista. Could you share your thoughts on this collaboration and the outlook for the future?
This collaboration is vital for Boa Vista. While teaching the future eye care providers (nurses and surgeons) is vital for the future of eye care in Angola, it has costs that Boa Vista could not meet on its own. By subsidizing the costs of training, it increases accessibility for many Angolan nurses who might not be able to pay for such a course on their own means. Teaching materials for surgery such as microscopes are very expensive, and partnerships with CBM help to provide those materials that Boa Vista would otherwise not be able to afford.
Thank you, Dr. Clements, for your time for this article. And for your long-standing dedication to help restore sight of the people of Angola and to support CBM Luxembourg in our mission.