Two thirds of the world's blind are women or girls
8 October 2009
This World Sight Day, 8 October, we are raising awareness about the comparatively high levels of blindness in women and girls. We have asked our NGO partners to collect information on the numbers of women and girls benefitting from its eye care programmes and to jointly address gender inequities in eye care access.
“Seeing is Believing is committed to providing comprehensive eye care services to 20 million people in the underprivileged areas of 20 cities across the globe. The objective of our programme is to provide access to those in need – both male and female. Two-thirds of blind people worldwide are women and girls. We will not succeed in eradicating blindness without ensuring women have equal access to eye care as men.” – Richard Meddings, Chairman of Seeing is Believing and Group Finance Director of Standard Chartered.
There are 45 million blind people in the world, yet 80% is avoidable. Women and girls account for two-thirds of the world’s blind. The most important factor in this imbalance is the huge discrepancy in access to eye-care services. In many countries, men are twice as likely to seek eye-care services as women. The reasons for this are complex and include lack of resources, service costs, low levels of education, inability to diagnose eye conditions, restrictions on mobility and time, and inappropriate or poor quality eye care.
“Seeing is Believing has asked its partners to look at how they are addressing the issue of gender. We need to combine the drive to bring eye care to as many people as possible with the need to make sure services are being accessed by women and girls. This requires an active approach to training medical staff and community workers in the issue and the collection of good gender disaggregated data on need and service provision to ensure we are closing the gap. We have received a positive response to this from our NGO partners.” – Sally Crook, Seeing is Believing Programme Manager, IAPB.
The impact of blindness on women’s ability to work and be independent has serious implications for household wealth, childcare and education. Women reinvest 90% of their income back into their households and community as opposed to 30-40% for men[1]. Women are often the members of household responsible for domestic tasks. Children, and particularly girls, are liable to be pulled out of school to take over domestic responsibilities when a mother goes blind.
Some examples of what we’re doing already:
Training Female community health workers
Many of our projects are already at work to address the gender imbalance. In Shahabad Dairy Slum in Delhi (India), our partner, Operation Eyesight Universal, trains Community Health Workers (CHWs) to identify eye-care problems in the slums and refer people to local vision centres. 88% of applications for these positions were from women. CHWs map out eye care needs in the slums and carry out front line referral services; using women can help ensure a gender sensitive approach to identifying patients.
In Pakistan, through Sightsavers International we’re sponsoring the training of 20,000 Lady Health Workers to deliver frontline eye care into the communities. Lady Health Workers are often the point of contact with eye care for women in rural areas.
Maternal Education
Through support to Helen Keller International, we are funding Vitamin A supplementation in 7 countries, reaching 1.24 million beneficiaries. Lack of Vitamin A is one of the leading causes of childhood blindness. In addition to distributing Vitamin A, HKI also runs education and awareness campaigns to educate mothers around nutrition. Maternal education has been identified as one of the most important factors in children receiving long-term health intervention.
We’re committed to addressing need and that means delivering services go to those that are most vulnerable, both men and women.
[1] Phil Borges, with foreword by Madeleine Albright, Women Empowered: Inspiring Change in the Emerging World [New York: Rizzoli, 2007], 13.
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