Currently, many child healthcare programmes globally do not include eye screening, and health workers are not trained in how to detect eye conditions. This leads to millions of children with eye conditions being missed and unable to access the care they need. In fact, around half of all children who are blind around the world are so unnecessarily.

The Child Eye Health Project is a research project from the International Centre for Eye Health.

The project aims to ensure that every child health worker globally knows how to detect and manage eye conditions in children, and that eye health becomes an essential part of every child health programme.

The team have worked on a trial to train primary health workers in one region of Tanzania to screen and detect eye conditions. The project was successful, connecting hundreds of thousands of children to eye care, and has been scaled up to be included in guidance for the whole country.

It is our goal that we can recreate this in 100 countries worldwide where children’s eye sight is most at risk. With more funding and prioritisation we can achieve this.

Find out more about this project and child eye health at https://childeyehealthproject.org/

We are grateful to the Vision Catalyst Fund for supporting the project. Find out more about the Fund at https://visioncatalystfund.org/