World Sight Day (WSD) is an annual day of awareness held on the second Thursday of October, to focus global attention on blindness and vision impairment.World Sight Day was on 13 October 2016.
International Key Messages
- Approximately 285 million people worldwide live with low vision and blindness
- Of these, 39 million people are blind and 246 million have moderate or severe visual impairment
- 90% of blind people live in low-income countries
- Yet 80% of visual impairment is avoidable – i.e. readily treatable and/or preventable
- Restorations of sight, and blindness prevention strategies are among the most cost-effective interventions in health care
- The number of people blind from infectious causes has greatly reduced in the past 20 years
- An estimated 19 million children are visually impaired
- About 65 % of all people who are visually impaired are aged 50 and older, while this age group comprises only 20% of the world’s population
- Increasing elderly populations in many countries mean that more people will be at risk of age-related visual impairment.
Objectives:
- Raise public awareness of blindness & vision impairment as major international public health issues
- Influence Governments/Ministers of Health to participate in and designate funds for national blindness prevention programes
- Educate target audiences about blindness prevention, about VISION 2020 and to generate support for VISION 2020 program activities
This year, the ‘Call to Action‘ for World Sight Day is: Strong Together
From our social responsibility as usual Magrabi was very keen to celebrate that event in different locations where we implemented different B2B and B2C activities like Health check stations, Awareness campaigns and special promotions which were much appreciated from the community and achieved the core value and main objective from this year Call to Action “Strong Together”.
