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Girls with her fingers shielding her eyes. Sightsavers
Vision Bangladesh
"It is the poorest people who are most at risk of blindness and low vision as they are more likely to go blind for a lack of simple treatment and stay blind for a lack of simple surgery." Founder and Chairperson of BRAC, Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, explains why this partnership with Sightsavers is so important.
It is an exciting time for us at BRAC as we join forces with Sightsavers in launching Vision Bangladesh. Our target is an ambitious but achievable ask - to eliminate cataract blindness completely in the northeastern region of Sylhet by 2014 and in Bangladesh by 2020.
In Bangladesh, people of all ages suffer from cataracts - not just the elderly. Children develop them from a lack of vitamin A or dehydration. And once blind, a child is at serious risk - 50% of children who go blind, die within two years.
Our programme will systematically screen one million predominately poor people and identify those blinded by cataracts who are in desperate need of surgery. We promise to successfully perform that surgery within 2 days of screening them with the appropriate after care.
'It costs very little to perform a sight-restoring cataract operation, and can take as little as 20 minutes and yet 80% of blind people in Bangladesh are denied that corrective surgery, plunging their families further into poverty.'
The impact of blindness can be particularly detrimental for those people living in poverty, severely limiting the education, employment and quality of life of otherwise healthy men, women, and children. Our collaboration with Sightsavers, one of the world's leading organisations working to eliminate avoidable blindness and promote equality of opportunity for disabled people, is of vital importance in tackling this neglected cause of extreme poverty and social exclusion.
This ambitious joint venture needs significant funding - a total of £3 million for the Sylhet phase alone over four years. With your help, Vision Bangladesh will provide 100,000 sight-restoring cataract operations for poor disabled people in Sylhet who at present cannot access the eye care services they desperately need.
I urge you to take action by supporting this ground-breaking programme. Together we can transform the lives of tens of thousands of poor Bangladeshi families.
