Statistics
Every 5 seconds, one person in our world goes blind... and a child goes blind every minute. 75% of the world’s blindness is preventable or curable and 90% of the visual impaired people live in developing countries. There are 161 million visual impaired people on this world. And of this 161 million 124 million people are in need of low vision services.

Cataract
Almost 18 million people are blinded by cataract – amounting to nearly half of all global blindness. Cataract is a cloudiness of the lens, stopping light from entering the eye and leading to blindness. Most cataracts are related to ageing, though some children are born with the condition. A low cost operation (at an average of 35€ in a developing country) removes the cloudy lens en successfully restores sight.

Trachoma
Trachoma is one of the oldest infectious diseases known to mankind and remains the world's leading preventable cause of blindness. An estimated 1,3 million people are irreversibly blinded by trachoma and about 146 million people currently suffer from the disease. Ten percent of the world's population is at risk of infection. Years of repeated infections, spread by close contact, severely scar the inside of the eyelids, turning them inward, making the lashes damage the surface of the eye leading to blindness. Dark & Light will deploy the SAFE strategy of

• Surgery to correct advanced-stage trachoma;
• Antibiotics to treat active infection;
• Face washing to reduce disease transmission;
• Environmental change to increase access to clean water, improved sanitation, and health education.

Onchocerciasis (river blindness)
River blindness is a major cause of incurable blindness chiefly in West en Central Africa. It is caused by a worm, passed on by the bite of a fly in fertile river areas. The disease has forces who communities to abandon arable lands in countries where agriculture is a life source. An annual dose of a tablet called Mectizan can stop the disease. In the last years there was a strong reduction of cases of river blindness, due to education and medicines. Right now there are about 295.000 cases of river blindness, but still millions of people are in risk of getting this disease.

Childhood Blindness
An estimated 1,4 million children are blind, mainly in Africa and Asia. In developing countries, blindness in children is usually caused by vitamin A deficiency, measles and conjunctivitis of the newborn. Other major causes of blindness include cataract in childhood, congenital glaucoma, and retinopathy of prematurity. Lack of vitamin A is the major cause and it leads to 350.000 blind children each year.