In marking this year’s World Sight day, Standard Chartered Bank Tanzania Limited has pledged to increase efforts to eliminate avoidable blindness in Tanzania.
Speaking at a public event to mark the World Sight Day in Dar es Salaam on Monday , the Bank’s Chief Executive Officer, Liz Lloyd, said the Bank’s ‘Seeing is Believing’ initiative, which funds projects to tackle avoidable blindness in the markets in where the bank operates, will reach ten regions in Tanzania.
She added that the bank is focusing on Children’s Eye Care and Health in its current phase which was launched in November, 2012 and is expected to run until the end of 2016.
"The bank has decided to focus on children in the new phase and you may wonder why - the impact of blindness and visual impairment on children is far greater than that for adults as a child has their whole life to live before them," she explained.
" In terms of the impact on reducing years lived with disability, curing a child of blindness is, on average, equivalent to curing ten adults with cataract blindness," she noted.
She also pointed out that the project already covers six regions of Tanzania, Manyara, Mbeya, Rukwa, Tabora, Dar es salaam and Mwanza and intends to cover four more regions in the next one to two years.
Under the ‘Seeing is Believing’ initiative, the bank has raised over USD32Million to date and invested in 66 projects in 23 countries to cure and prevent blindness.
‘Seeing is Believing’ has funded cataract operations for 2.78 million people and touched the lives of over 20 million people around the world through its work to develop comprehensive eye care facilities among underprivileged populations across the developing world.
In Tanzania, the Bank’s ‘Seeing is Believing’ initiative has raised USD800, 000, which is equivalent to 1.2bn/- , in its previous phase – 2009 and 2010. It had partnered with Comprehensive Community Based Rehabilitation in Tanzania (CCBRT) where over 177,000 people benefitted from the project.
Under the new phase, by June this year, over 21,500 children had been screened in various regions in Tanzania covered by the project. Over 60 surgeries had been carried and over 70 refractive errors had been corrected.
On completion, the project is expected to achieve big results including 17 million Tanzanian children benefitting through conducive changes in National Policies, strengthening of National Coordination and promoting Child Eye Health, over 360,000 children accessing eye health services at the eye unit level, over 2,000 children receiving surgery for cataract operations and others, and over 5,400 children with significant refractive error receiving spectacles.
The Bank has partnered with various eye care partners under two consortia led by the Christian Blind Mission and the Brien Holden Vision Institute and the Ministry of Health.
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