Women’s Eye Health
Vision impairment disproportionately impacts women and girls, making it a significant gender issue. Preventing avoidable blindness and vision impairment has a crucial role to play in the reduction of gender inequalities and in the overall effort to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.
Recent estimates indicate that 56% of blind adults are women, and two thirds of blind children are girls. Women and girls are more likely to suffer from vision impairment than men or boys. This is due to many factors, such as their traditional roles in the household involving cleaning and caring for ill family members, and the fact that they are less likely to receive access to care and treatment when available. More than 20 million women and girls are blind, and more than 120 million are visually impaired.
Vision loss in women can exacerbate existing gender inequalities like limited education and employment opportunities and can even result in community exclusion. This can increase women’s dependency on their husbands or other relatives and limits their decision-making power. The ripple effect stemming from proper eye health can also play a vital role in reducing gender inequalities. When women are empowered to make decisions regarding their own health, they have the ability to improve the overall health of their families and impact their entire communities. Two of the biggest challenges to gender equity programming that we face in eye health are addressing cultural barriers and getting the full buy-in and support from local partner organizations.
Operation Eyesight, is working to implement gender transformative strategies, meaning we will look at how we are working with communities to make sure that we are reaching and treating even the most vulnerable people. By working directly with local communities, we can better understand the barriers women face, take affirmative action in training and human resource development to ensure there are more women in the health care system, and remove the barriers to access to services.
With your participation and support we can address the gender inequality among the women and girls to bring quality, affordable and accessible eye health care to families who need it most.
To join us click here.
