When Martin Aufmuth, a math teacher in Erlangen, Germany, read in 2009 that hundreds of millions of people worldwide suffered from vision impairment but could not afford glasses, he could hardly believe it. “It was the book Out of Poverty by Paul Polak,” Aufmuth remembers, “I thought, ‘This can’t be true.’” But it was and it is. The World Health Organization estimates that at least one billion people have a near or distance vision impairment that could have been prevented or has yet to be addressed. Eighty percent of them could be helped with relatively easy means, like glasses. The day after reading Polak’s book, Aufmuth passed a one-euro shop and spotted reading glasses for a single euro. “I thought, strange, we have this here,” he says. “Why not elsewhere?” A woman making a pair of glasses in Brazil. Courtesy of One Dollar Glasses After researching existing efforts, he found no large-scale solution that satisfied him. Donated second-hand glasses, often mismatched and poorly distributed, did not seem sustainable. “That wasn’t a solution for me,” he says. Aufmuth was searching for ways to make a difference. Years earlier, inspired in part by his wife’s blunt advice — “then do something” — he had raised significant funds for development initiatives in Malawi and organized climate campaigns that mobilized hundreds of thousands of children. “I realized,” he says, “that even as an individual, I can move something.” So he disappeared into his basement to tinker. The result was the EinDollarBrille (“One Dollar Glasses”), a pair of glasses made from highly flexible spring steel wire and shatterproof plastic lenses. Aufmuth has been wearing glasses since childhood and knows firsthand how precious eyesight is. He takes off his glasses, one of his models, pops out the lenses and shows how bendable the frame is. “You can take the lenses out, adjust everything,” he explains “You could run a jeep over it and it would not break.”