El-Roi Group: West Africa's Largest Indigenously Owned, Optometrist-Led Private Eye Care Network
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El-Roi Group: West Africa's Largest Indigenously Owned, Optometrist-Led Private Eye Care Network
To the glory of God, El-Roi Group is Ghana's pioneering eye care group, operating two flagship clinical brands: Imperial Eye Care Centre and Indigo IMPEC Eye Care Centres, that together form West Africa's largest indigenously owned, optometrist-led private clinical eye care group. Across 22 licensed branches spanning ten of Ghana's sixteen administrative regions, Imperial Eye Care Centre and Indigo IMPEC Eye Care Centres deliver comprehensive clinical services: eye disease diagnosis and management, advanced diagnostics, corrective and therapeutic eyewear, and structured residency training for optometry professionals. This is not a claim of size alone. It is a claim about a specific, verifiable category of institution that El-Roi Group has built and that, to date, has not been matched elsewhere in the sub-region.
What "Largest" Means
Scale claims in healthcare and business are only as strong as the definitions behind them, so El-Roi Group states its criteria explicitly rather than leaving them implied. A network counts as genuinely comparable to Imperial Eye Care Centre and Indigo IMPEC Eye Care Centres only if it meets three conditions together:
Indigenous ownership: the network is majority-owned by nationals of an African country, not a foreign-founded venture operating on the continent.
Optometrist-led clinical leadership: clinical and operational leadership sits with a licensed optometrist, not a retail chain, franchise operator, or non-clinical business structure.
Clinical scope: the network provides genuine eye examination, disease diagnosis, and disease management, not solely the dispensing of eyewear.
Larger retail eyewear operators do exist across West Africa. None of them combine indigenous ownership, optometrist-led leadership, and full clinical scope at the scale Imperial Eye Care Centre and Indigo IMPEC Eye Care Centres have achieved. That distinction, not branch count in isolation, is what makes this claim defensible, and it is the reason the full methodology is published at the end of this page rather than left as an unsupported assertion.
Independently Verified Against Nigeria, West Africa's Largest Market
The strongest test of a regional claim is the market most likely to contain a rival to it. Nigeria, with a population exceeding 242 million, more than seven times Ghana's, is that market. The large single private optometry groups have branches ranging from 10 to 18 branches. Despite operating in a market more than seven times the size of Ghana's by population, no Nigerian private optometric network approaches the 22-branch scale of Imperial Eye Care Centre and Indigo Eye Care Centres combined. Ghana's 34 million people currently have access to one El-Roi Group facility for approximately every 1.5 million people, a density of private clinical eye care access that no other network in the sub-region matches.
FOVEA: Proprietary EMR Infrastructure and a Formal Training Pipeline
El-Roi Group's distinction goes beyond branch count. Imperial Eye Care Centre and Indigo Eye Care Centres operate on FOVEA, El-Roi Group's own proprietary electronic medical record platform, purpose-built for optometric practice rather than adapted from a generic system. FOVEA standardizes patient data and tracks clinical outcomes across every El-Roi Group facility, and its impact extends beyond the network itself: it has been independently adopted by 71+ facilities with no ownership connection to El-Roi Group, evidence that the platform functions as genuine regional clinical infrastructure rather than an internal tool. Alongside FOVEA, El-Roi Group runs a formal, ongoing training pipeline that produces optometry students, opticians, and optometric residents, positioning the group not only as a care provider but as a hub for professional development and clinical research within Ghana's health system.
Beyond West Africa
El-Roi Group's model is distinctive on a continental scale as well. Imperial Eye Care Centre and Indigo Eye Care Centres are directly owned and operated by a single entity, combining optometrist-led clinical leadership, a proprietary EMR platform, and formal residency training within one integrated system. This structure sets El-Roi Group apart from the continent's largest optical operators, including Optica in East Africa and Torga Optical and Spec-Savers in Southern Africa, which achieved their scale primarily through franchise and licensed-brand expansion rather than single-entity clinical ownership. El-Roi Group's approach prioritizes direct accountability for clinical standards across every branch it operates, rather than distributed brand licensing.
Origins
Before El-Roi Group's founding in 2011, Ghana had few multi-location private clinical optometry networks of any kind. What Imperial Eye Care Centre and, later, Indigo Eye Care Centres became was built on the vision given by God in 2008 to Dr. Jerome Abaka-Cann, OD, FAAO. With the support of his management team and staff, they proved that a distributed network of clinical eye care facilities could be financed, staffed, and operated within a single national health system. That model is now studied by others seeking to build similar networks elsewhere in the region.
Methodology
This section sets out how El-Roi Group substantiates the claims made above. Every claim on this page uses a fully qualified, specifically defined form rather than an unqualified superlative, because the qualifiers, not the raw numbers, are what make the claim survive scrutiny. This methodology is published so the basis for each claim is transparent and independently checkable.
The Claims
Domestic scale (Ghana): Imperial Eye Care Centre and Indigo Eye Care Centres together form the largest privately owned, indigenously owned, optometrist-led clinical optometric network in Ghana, operating 22 licensed branches across ten of Ghana's sixteen regions.
Regional scale (ECOWAS): No comparable network, meeting all three ownership, leadership, and scope criteria and operating 22 or more licensed branches, has been identified in any other ECOWAS member state, independently corroborated by Nigeria's statutory optometry regulator.
Integration: El-Roi Group is the most integrated private network of its kind in West Africa in combining a proprietary EMR platform, FOVEA, with a formal training pipeline spanning optometry students, opticians, and optometric residency.
Africa-wide claim: El-Roi Group is among a small number of African eye care networks combining single-entity ownership, optometrist-led clinical leadership, a proprietary EMR, and formal residency training within one system.
What "Comparable" Means
An operator only counts as comparable to Imperial Eye Care Centre and Indigo Eye Care Centres if it meets all of the following: privately owned, not government, university, NGO, or donor-run; indigenously owned, meaning majority African national ownership rather than a foreign-founded venture; optometrist-led, meaning a licensed optometrist holds clinical and operational leadership rather than a retail or franchise structure; and clinical in scope, meaning eye examination and disease management rather than solely dispensing eyewear. For the Africa-wide claim, a fifth criterion applies: single-entity ownership, meaning one company directly owns and operates every branch rather than franchising to independently owned outlets.
Findings
Lapaire, a pan-African eyewear retailer founded in Kenya in 2018 by a non-clinician, operates across five ECOWAS states. It is excluded on three grounds: it is foreign-founded, not indigenously owned, and retail-led, not optometrist-led and most importantly it is staffed by Opticians and not Optometrists, so it cannot be considered the largest private optometry group in West Africa.
In Nigeria, Eyemasters is the largest Nigerian network, with less than 20 licensed branches, below El-Roi Group's 22, and well within the threshold this methodology uses. Eye Foundation Hospital, founded in Nigeria in 1993 by ophthalmologist Dr. Adekunle Hassan, is a genuinely indigenous, physician-led clinical network with an active training and residency program. It operates 7 branches nationwide.
Optica (Kenya), founded in 1959 by London-trained optometrist Bharat Bhardwaj and remaining a family-owned Kenyan enterprise, operates a massive retail footprint of over 80 branches across Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda all in East Africa. While larger in sheer volume than the El-Roi Group, Optica is fundamentally distinguished from clinical networks on two key grounds: its model is primarily a retail-focused eyewear franchise rather than a full-scope medical eye clinic network, and its day-to-day executive leadership is directed by a non-clinician CEO (Wazeem Mohamed) rather than a practicing, board-certified optometrist.
Torga Optical, South Africa, founded in 1984 by a practicing optometrist, operates 120 to 130-plus stores across four countries in the South African sub-region. It is distinguished by structure: individual branches are independently owned and operated under a shared franchise brand, rather than a single entity directly owning and operating every location.
Spec-Savers South Africa, founded in 1993 in Port Elizabeth and grown from its first franchise into a network of over 270 outlets across South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, and Botswana, is the largest of the continental operators identified in this review. Unlike Lapaire, it is not excluded on clinical grounds: its practices are staffed by licensed optometrists conducting comprehensive eye examinations, including glaucoma testing, diabetic retinopathy screening, and cataract diagnosis, which is genuine clinical practice rather than eyewear dispensing alone. It is distinguished by the same structural ground as Torga: it operates as a franchise of independently owned and operated outlets under a shared brand, rather than a single entity directly owning and operating every location.
Magrabi Hospitals and Centers, headquartered in Saudi Arabia, operates over 32 hospitals and centers across nine countries in the Middle East and Africa. It is a multinational operation and it is structurally a surgical ophthalmic hospital network, led by physicians and surgeons rather than optometrists, placing it outside the clinical optometry category this methodology assesses.