Country Statement
Pakistan is located in South Asia, bounded by China, India, Iran and Afghanistan. With a growing population surpassing 220million, Pakistan encompasses a large middle-class population, which supports its position as an emerging and growth leading economy.
With such rapid social and economic development, as well as a rural population of 61.2%, challenges such as access to affordable health care have arisen. In particular, vision impairment and blindness has become a challenge, with approximately 12 million people living with some sort of visual impairment.
| Blindness (age 50and above) | 2.02% |
| All vision loss (crude) | 11.60% (IAPB) |
| Major cause of blindness | Cataract untreated 49.2% Refractive error 11.9% Uncorrected Aphakia 07 % Glaucoma 10 % Age Related Macular Degeneration 05 % Corneal Opacity 09 % Diabetic retinopathy 03 %. |
| Population has some difficulty in with seeing | 14.3% |
| Un met need for distance glasses | 82% |
| Unmet need for reading glasses | 66.7 |
Program Highlights
Child Eye Health (CEH)
We collaborate with the government, NGOs, academia, and hospitals to establish high-quality eye health services that meet the needs and expectations of children and their families. Additionally, we strive to provide more intensive support to the most vulnerable individuals. Our child eye health program is designed to enhance the quality of life and educational performance of children by addressing common eye health conditions such as vision impairment, uncorrected refractive errors, low vision, and ocular morbidity.
Furthermore, we achieve our objectives by disseminating health promotion materials and information, emphasising the significance of eye health and its implications.
Low vision services
We contribute to the advancement of low vision management services throughout Pakistan as part of comprehensive eye care, linking them with education, rehabilitation, and social services.
By providing low vision services and creating important connections, our program improves education and employment opportunities for people with low vision. This effort also helps extend low vision services to the most vulnerable communities, supporting the National Eye Health Plan.
Social enterprise approach to optical services
Our eye health social enterprise initiative aims to address the significant unmet demand for refractive services at the community level. This innovative approach ensures the delivery of affordable, accessible, and high-quality optical care, using business principles to sustain and expand services. The program provides glasses to about 85,000 people annually and fosters collaboration among health professionals, the private sector, and communities to promote health.
Workforce development and education
Our workforce development and education program aims to build the capacity of the eye health workforce, as outlined in the Workforce Development Strategy of the National Eye Health Plan. We achieve this mainly through partnerships with optometry schools in both the public and private sectors. We focus on training school teachers, police officers, social welfare officers, social workers, volunteers, and lady health workers in primary eye care and vision screening. Additionally, we train faculty and develop academic vision centers.
We work with optometry schools to enhance their capacity and raise professional standards in eye care. We support the development of optometry training programs by providing technical assistance to create a standardized national curriculum, identifying gaps in current training, educating faculty, and improving infrastructure. Our multi-tiered approach promotes sustainable economic development, creates employment opportunities, and provides essential services in underserved areas.
Supporting stakeholders to enable universal access to eye health services
The fundamental principle guiding our collaboration work is ‘joint advocacy,’; working closely with partners and stakeholders. Coordinated efforts serve as one of the cornerstone strategies through which we achieve our program objectives. We concentrate on effecting changes at both the practice and policy levels within eye health systems.
Measure the change and impact of our initiatives
We have strategically positioned ourselves as an enabler and catalyst in the development and strengthening of eye health services in both the public and private sectors. We gauge the change and impact of our initiatives through consistent monitoring, evaluations, impact assessments, research, and the assessment of development effectiveness.