17 August 2022
The IAPB highlighted that more than 1 billion of the most vulnerable people worldwide have poor vision and no access to treatment, while 90% of sight loss is preventable or treatable.
The campaign will highlight the positive impact eye care can have on education, economic productivity and safety.
As part of the campaign, the IAPB is calling on government and industry leaders to focus on three key areas: the provision of more accessible eye care, making sight tests available to more people, and ensuring that glasses are affordable for those who need them.
The Love Your Eyes campaign will also highlight programmes that are successfully addressing poor vision at a local level to encourage government and businesses to make systemic changes and investments, the IAPB said.
Caroline Casey, IAPB president, called the Love Your Eyes campaign “crucial,” commenting: “Action and accountability need to come from those in the highest offices.”
“We need governments around the world to unlock funds, prioritise eye care and address regulatory barriers that are stunting access to affordable lenses. We need government and businesses to focus on our children, the elderly, those on the lowest incomes – to ensure that their safety, quality of life, access to education and ability to work is no longer held back by sight issues,” Casey continued.
The campaign represents an opportunity to “change the lives of over a billion people on this planet in the next decade,” Casey said. “It is an ambitious campaign, but if we truly want the world to be a better place we must act now.”
Love Your Eyes originally launched as part of World Sight Day in 2021. Now the campaign will be in place year-round to raise the profile of eye health, encourage the public to take care of their eyes, and to also raise awareness of the 1.1 billion people who do not have access to eye care worldwide.
Leading the way
As part of the global launch of the campaign, the IAPB has highlighted initiatives to provide accessible eye care led by its members in India and Kenya.
Sight loss costs Kenya between $229–294 million in lost Gross National Income, the IAPB said, highlighting the importance of work by CBM, The Fred Hollows Foundation, and the Nairobi City Eye Hospital, to reach out to individuals whose vision is affecting their ability to learn, work and be active.
The cost of sight loss in India is estimated to be INR 1158 billion. Sightsavers India has developed a truckers’ outreach programme to address the correlation between poor vision and road traffic accidents. The programme facilitates accessible screenings with the immediate dispensing of prescriptions and spectacles. Sightsavers, in collaboration with a global social enterprise, VisionSpring, and others, has provided vision screening for more than a million drivers and committed to screening another million.
VisionSpring celebrated the launch of the Love Your Eyes campaign at a school vision screening in New Delhi where more than 200 students had their eyes checked. These students are among 300,000 that the charity has committed to serve this year.
Comments (0)
You must be logged in to join the discussion. Log in