37 million people in the world are blind. 90% of them live in the least economically developed regions of the world. In three out of four cases, blindness could be avoided or treated and sight restored.
The World Health Organisation and NGOs active in the field of blindness prevention have set an ambitious goal for themselves: The international campaign VISION 2020 - The Right to Sight is intended to make avoidable blindness a thing of the past by the year 2020.
The core of this campaign VISION 2020 is the development and implementation of national plans for blindness prevention in which the governmental offices agree on priorities for each country together with the NGOs, specialised institutes, and educational establishments, and combine their efforts to achieve the overall campaign objective. The measures supported by LIGHT FOR THE WORLD for the elimination of preventable blindness in developing countries include training of local eye specialists in Ethiopia and Pakistan, the provision of mobile surgery for blind and partially sighted people in rural areas of Northeast India and developing blindness prevention programmes in central and northern Mozambique. These initiatives are being implemented within the framework of national plans that already exist or are under development, in order to secure local management and sustainability of the initiative and its integration into the existing national health care system.
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