A story of saving sight

One of the highlights of the year was meeting the women attending a training programme on board the Orbis Flying Eye Hospital in Doha. This pioneering initiative saw a female-only volunteer faculty working with 12 women drawn from countries affected by conflict. It was hugely inspiring to talk to the participants and hear about the challenges they face in the countries where they work every single day and their commitment to provide sight-saving treatment for their patients.

The disruption to the global supply of antibiotics to treat trachoma eye infections in Ethiopia was a significant challenge to the team in 2022. They delivered 3.4 million doses which was short of our target and these activities will continue to be difficult to implement in 2023 despite hopes that these shortages will ease.

You can read how the Ethiopia team turned the challenge of the limited availability of antibiotics into an opportunity to redouble community outreach work which takes eye care services close to where people live.

In Nepal, our Aid Match project helped children like seven-year-old Aadya to see better at school through screening her vision and providing her with glasses. The three-year project finished in 2022 and delivered impressive results. Over 330,000 children were screened either in school or on their doorstep, making a significant contribution to the reduction in avoidable childhood blindness in the country. The project was funded by the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office.

In Zambia we were delighted to see the number of patients attending primary and district eye care facilities increase in the three districts we supported. This comes as a direct result of community health workers having an increased awareness of eye conditions thanks to the training that Orbis provided. We did this through Viamo – an innovative low-tech mobile phone training platform.

Also last year, Mongolia’s Ministry of Health approved the inclusion of Red Reflex testing into the national paediatrics residency training curriculum. This means that more babies will be screened and treated for retinopathy of prematurity (ROP), a condition that can
cause blindness if left untreated.

We are already working hard to build on our successes in 2022 with ambitious plans to scale up our work, with the fundraising infrastructure in place to help us achieve this.

We’re aiming to raise more money, support more projects, and deliver more sight‑saving training and treatments to people who live where eye care resources are scarce. We are confident that together we can get even closer to our ambition of creating a world where no one lives with avoidable vision loss, simply because of where they were born.

With best wishes,

Rebecca Cronin (chief executive)
Nick Fox (chair)