From the latest UN data available, the Vision Impact Institute has estimated that there are 2.5bn people in the world who have poor vision, and no means of correcting it. That is not far short of the number of people who live in China, India and Japan, combined.
It is thought that nearly 80 per cent of these cases could be corrected by something as simple as a pair of glasses.
Poor vision is not a life-threatening condition; it falls into a non-urgent category, which puts it low on the priority scale for development funding, often failing to make the list for global health and economic targets.This categorisation is undeserved and must change. According to a landmark report published by Access Economics, rates of poor vision are costing the global economy an estimated $3tn a year. That’s more than the total gross domestic product of Africa.