About the project
More than half a million people in poor areas of Sri Lanka’s modern and ancient capital cities will have new access to quality eye treatment through our project to cut avoidable blindness.
With our partners International Centre for Eyecare Education and Sightsavers International, we are focused on the growing need to correct poor vision - or uncorrected refracted error - in deprived areas of the country’s capital, Colombo and its traditional hill capital, Kandy.
Over half the world’s population is now living in urban areas. But providing public health services in fast-growing, underprivileged urban areas is increasingly acute. Blindness is a major issue faced by the poorest people here – but with our help, it is preventable and treatable.
This project is part of Seeing is Believing’s latest commitment to invest a further US $20m in developing comprehensive, sustainable eye-care for 20 million people in the underprivileged areas of 20 cities across the world.
We want to develop long-term capacity for the future, integrated with supporting wider health systems, and which aim to be financially stable beyond our projects.
By the end of the project we will have:
- Strengthened access to Primary Eye Care services for around 600,000 people in poor urban communities
- Training for healthworkers and professionals
- Reduced need for basic eye-care at hospitals by providing primary care at local level but improving referrals to hospitals for complex treatments
- Strengthened School Eye-Health services, screenings and referrals at 1000 schools - with 2000 teachers trained, and 625,000 children screened annually
- Provided 12,000 children with further treatment - 100 for cataract surgery and 7,500 provided with free spectacles each year
- Training for teachers to support children with low-vision
- Established a sustainable model for refractive error services – two Vision Centres, an Optical lab and Optical workshop attached to government eye hospitals in Colombo and Kandy.