In those days, Operation Eyesight focused mainly on people with cataracts. Cataract surgery is still an important part of our work because cataract remains the world’s leading cause of avoidable blindness. In fact, more than half of the world’s blind people are blind because of cataract.

For a child, being blind means she can’t go to school – and education is the ticket to a better life in the developing world. Blindness for an older person means that he is totally dependent on family for even the simplest things like food and finding his way to the outhouse. In the developing world, a blind woman may be outcast, abandoned by family because she is seen as a burden.

As the countries in which we work develop functional health care systems, hospitals become more efficient and can meet international standards. And strengthening the health care systems is the best strategy to deal with the backlog of cataract cases.

When you donate for a cataract surgery, you’re not only giving a person in Africa or India the gift of sight, but you’re also contributing to the operating costs of that hospital until that hospital is self-sufficient and can cover these costs themselves.

Subsidizing operating costs is important for new partners in India, and for partners in Africa where achieving self-sufficiency is a longer process.

Ultimately, a more efficient, productive hospital means that it will eventually be able to fund the surgeries and other necessary costs itself. That is Operation Eyesight’s goal – strong hospitals and health systems that can operate successfully without any outside intervention. Most importantly, it gets us closer to a world free of avoidable blindness.

The post The gift of sight – and much, much more appeared first on Operation Eyesight.

If you’re a senior reading this or a grandparent (like I am), you probably already know how important it is to safeguard your vision. If you’re a younger person, take note.

Statistics show that the world’s population is aging, and as the number of older people grows, eye health issues like low vision and blindness become acute. Visual impairment often contributes to injuries and death in older people, but timely intervention can delay the effects of age-related blinding conditions.

For those of us living in wealthy nations like Canada, our health care systems include eye care as part of the package. For you and me, the major threat as we grow older is cataract (clouding of the lens), followed by age-related macular degeneration (loss of central vision), which is a growing problem. For these and other vision threats, help is available to us as long as we’re paying attention to our health.

But that isn’t the case in many counties, especially throughout Africa where primary eye care just isn’t a priority. This is one of the areas where Operation Eyesight is at work, encouraging national governments in Africa to include plans for eye care in their national health strategies.

Globally, blindness among seniors is a major health issue. The World Health Organization estimates that the number of people in the world who are blind or visually impaired is 285 million.

Of those, 65 percent are over the age of 50. Imagine how tragic it must be like to be blind and poor – and old!

The risk of vision-impairing conditions like cataract grows exponentially with increasing age. Because the majority of cataract blindness is in people ages 45 and up, there are many grandparents in developing countries who have never even seen their grandchildren. Children are often affected because they get pulled out of school to serve as the “eyes” for a blind grandparent.

For more success stories like this, visit our website. Thanks for reading … and remember not to take your eyesight for granted!

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