Our Top Achievements This Year at Orbis UK

Thanks to our incredible partners, supporters, and teams on the ground, we’ve made amazing progress in eliminating preventable blindness and expanding access to life-changing eye care. Here are some of our proudest accomplishments from 2025.

In a historic milestone, all three districts in Ethiopia’s Sheka Zone have eliminated trachoma infections in children aged 1–9 years old.

Back in 2013, more than 1 in 10 children carried the infection. Today, prevalence is below 5% across the zone, meaning around 250,000 people no longer require mass drug administration (MDA). This frees up vital health workers and resources for other urgent health needs.

There is still work ahead, including teaching people about keeping their faces clean to prevent infection, safe latrines, and providing surgery for trichiasis, the painful, blinding stage of trachoma. But this achievement marks a huge step toward protecting future generations from avoidable blindness in Ethiopia.

For the first time, people in South West Ethiopia, home to more than 3.5 million people and an area the size of Switzerland, now have access to regular secondary eye care.

Orbis is supporting two new secondary eye care units in Bonga Town and Mizan Aman, bringing essential services closer to home. The project will provide:

• Nearly 70,000 eye assessments
• 5,100 surgeries, including 4,200 cataract operations
• 3,000 people with glasses

Before this, many people had to wait for visiting medical teams or travel hundreds of miles to get the care they needed. 

This year we launched a major new programme in Zambia’s North Western Province, giving 1.3 million people access to primary and secondary eye care.

The project strengthens services across every district, ensuring people can receive treatment for common conditions like conjunctivitis, and be referred for cataract surgery or glasses when needed. It also builds long-term capacity, including training a paediatric ophthalmologist and ophthalmic nurses.

So far, the project has delivered:

• Over 140,000 eye assessments
• 1,600 surgeries
• Glasses to 2,000 people

Orbis remains the only NGO supporting Low Vision services in Vietnam, and interest in our work is growing rapidly.

Our teams visited Hai Phong Eye Hospital with Low Vision experts from Aravind, where hospital staff expressed strong enthusiasm for developing their own LV services. We also met with partners at Hanoi Medical University and the National Eye Hospital, who shared their plans to establish new vision centres to support patients with LV.

Orbis Vietnam ran a two-day Low Vision workshop in Ho Chi Minh City, where 32 doctors and hospital leaders from 10 hospitals planned how to start or improve Low Vision services across the country. This marks a major step forward in ensuring people with Low Vision receive the specialised support they deserve.

This year has been remarkable, and every milestone is powered by people like you. Together, we’re building a world where everyone can access the eye care they need to thrive.