Improving the vision of children across the globe

It is estimated that globally there are around 815 million school-aged children who require some form of vision correction to see clearly. In developing countries alone the estimates are of 180 million children who could benefit from vision correction. The majority of these children do not have access to affordable eye examination or a pair of glasses. 

Simply put,  in resource poor countries there are not enough eye care professionals and the equipment and glasses used are often too expensive and difficult to obtain.

Impact of poor vision on child development

This massive number of children with poor vision presents a major issue for child development. Children with poor eye sight are more likely to suffer from poor academic performance, school absenteeism and dropout rates are higher and long term career prospects are poorer. Uncorrected vision in children will reduce the benefits of global investments in education and hinder the attainment of the education related Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and ‘Education for All’ (EFA).

Specialist in a School Health and Nutrition, Professor Don Bundy, from the World Bank agrees, “In many schools in low income countries, particularly in Africa, it is the exception to find a child with glasses. This does not reflect lack of need, but lack of access. Yet providing glasses to help children see would seem to be one of the most basic interventions necessary for children to take full advantage of education and grow up to lead productive lives"

Vision conference

The 2nd Oxford Conference on Vision for Children in the Developing World held at Oxford University in April 2011 offered the opportunity to discuss the strategy for improving vision amongst school-age children in the developing world. 

This conference enabled expert discussion on child vision by development specialists, academics, vision experts, non-governmental organisations and representatives of the private sector.

The second conference built on the conclusions of the first conference in 2007. This initial meeting identified that new innovative technologies such as self-refraction with adjustable spectacles could be used to improve the vision of adults in resource-poor setting but more research needed to be conducted to see if these technologies worked for children as well. 

As a response to this the Partnership for Child Development (PCD),  funded the three year ‘Child Self Refraction Study (CSRS)’ to conduct three studies of self-refraction with adjustable spectacles among teenagers in Boston (USA) and in urban and rural China. 

The recently published results of this study were presented to the 2011 conference. The results indicated that the overwhelming majority of children in the study settings could obtain excellent vision and good accuracy with self-refraction.  

The experts at the meeting concluded that the implementation of currently available spectacle technologies, as well as the provision of supporting personnel, needed to be scaled up to address uncorrected vision in children. Innovative new solutions such, such as ‘self-refraction’ with adjustable spectacles, had the potential to dramatically increase the coverage of programmes in resource-poor settings.