Seeing is Believing

Standard Chartered Bank.

Seeing is Believing is Standard Chartered’s global initiative to tackle avoidable blindness. It funds projects through eye care organisations to develop eye care capacity and provide services for communities in need. Standard Chartered has committed to raising USD 100 million by 2020, of which half is provided through the Bank’s investment and half is generated by staff and business-led fundraising initiatives.

Progress of Standard Chartered so far.

By supporting the development of local eye care capacity through its projects, it can ensure that the impact of its funding goes far beyond the life of its projects. For example, Seeing is Believing has funded the training of over 58,000 health workers, from eye surgeons to nurses, optometrists and community based health workers.

It has helped over 25 million people to date through direct service provision and education and awareness campaigns. It has contributed to over 2.7 million sight restorations and treating 3.9million people for Vitamin A deficiency and river blindness.

Know the facts

There are 39 million blind people in the world.
80% of blindness is avoidable (meaning preventable or treatable).
Almost 90% of blind people live in low-income countries.
A further 246 million people have moderate or severe visual impairment.
A child goes blind every minute.
60% of children die within one year of going blind.
The estimated economic cost of lost productivity from avoidable blindness is estimated USD 200 billion annually .
145 million people are visually impaired due to uncorrected refractive errors, indicating that the prescription of glasses could restore normal vision for millions of people.
Action is making a difference. Infectious causes of blindness are decreasing as a result of public health interventions and socio-economic development. Blinding trachoma now affects fewer than 80 million people, compared to 360 million in 1985.
Ageing populations and lifestyle changes mean that chronic blinding conditions such as diabetic retinopathy are projected to rise steeply in the next ten years.