India had an exciting year! Thanks to our donors and partners we screened more than two million people who were at risk of losing their sight.
Declaring villages avoidable blindness-free is the pinnacle of our work. We’re ecstatic to say that we declared our 500th village free of avoidable blindness in 2017.
With the help of our partner Gerald A. Cooper-Key Foundation we declared 11 of those villages avoidable blindness-free. In fact, the Director General of Health Services of the Indian government recognized our work in reaching remote areas.
Gerald A. Cooper-Key Foundation also supported more than 500 eye surgeries.
Successful partnerships contribute to our accomplishments. Standard Chartered Bank’s Seeing is Believing supported us in establishing 12 new Vision Centres. With their help we passed another landmark when we opened our 100th Vision Centre. We’re delighted to report that by the end of the year we’d opened 108 Vision Centres.
We’re also grateful for the continued support from Bharat Financial Inclusion. Thanks to their generosity we performed more than 5,000 cataract surgeries in eight Indian states.
On the technology front, our partnership with Pellucid Inc, a Singapore based eye tech firm, is thriving. With Pellucid technology:
- 60 Vision Centres are reporting online.
- 30 tablets are using a tracking application to cover household surveys for 750,000 people.
We continue to be recognized as eye health care experts. Last year Operation Eyesight’s Dr. Santosh Moses, Regional Manager for South Asia was elected Vice President to the Executive Committee of VISION 2020 India. Also, Operation Eyesight was nominated to the Universal Eye Health Committee of the Government of Odisha.
And for fun, our Indian team marathoners ran in the Airtel Hyderabad Marathon. Raising an impressive $11,000, Operation Eyesight was recognized as an official charity for the marathon. The fun’raising was the easy part and our team did the hard part — running distances ranging between 10 and 42.2 km. Remarkable!
In addition, we expanded our Community-Based Diabetic Retinopathy project to two new cities last year — Udgir, Maharashtra and Udaipur, Rajasthan.
Thanks to our amazing donors India had a dynamic year!
Thanks to Gerald A. Cooper-Key Foundation and the Koehle Family Trust, these Vision Centres are permanent facilities. Each Vision Centre is now financially self-sustaining and provides eye care services in areas where none existed. Also, with Gerald A. Cooper-Key Foundation support, we’re proud to announce the inauguration of the upgraded out-patient department at Fateh-Bal Eye Hospital last year.
We’re just getting started in Nepal, and our future in the country promises to give new-found hope and freedom to thousands of people.
We couldn’t do it without our loyal donors. Thank you!
Our momentum continues in Nepal as we move into our second year working in the county. With great support from our donors and partners, we trained 14 new eye health care staff. Working with Nepal Eye Hospital and Fateh-Bal Eye Hospital we established three new Vision Centres linked to these hospitals.
Thank you for making 2017 another fantastic year!
Published on October 18, 2018
