Churches across the country are being asked to mark World Sight Day with a special Sunday service on 15th October. Sightsavers International, one of the UK’s leading blindness charities is highlighting the fact that an estimated 37 million people are blind in the world, and that every five seconds a person goes blind.

|TOP|In the run up to the annual event, Sightsavers International are explaining that an incredible 75 percent of blindness is preventable.

The vast majority of people who are blind or visually impaired live in the developing world and are often marginalised within their own communities, consequently making them at greater risk of social exclusion.

Healthcare spending is notoriously low in many of the countries in which Sightsavers works – the average person in Liberia, for example, is allotted a mere £6 per year, compared to around £1200 in the UK.

This is the first time that Sightsavers has worked with churches to promote World Sight Day and according to Russell Richards, the organisation’s community groups manager:

|AD|“Focusing on people in less well-off countries than our own is nothing new but Sightsavers Sunday will give churches and their parishioners an opportunity to discuss some of the wider issues around disability in the developing world, such as how being blind can lead to missing out on an education and subsequently a livelihood.

“The beauty of our work is that it can be very cost-effective – for example it only costs 12 pence a year to protect somebody from a crippling disease like river blindness – so we hope that people don’t necessarily feel that they have to dig deep in order to make a real difference to the lives of people in some of the world’s most disadvantaged countries.”

Six-year-old Ritu from Bangladesh is just one of millions whose life has been transformed by the work of Sightsavers and its local partners. Born with cataracts in both eyes, she was identified during a mass screening of children as part of the charity’s Bangladesh Childhood Cataract Campaign which aims to track down every child in the country who is needlessly blind due to cataract by the year 2009.

She was taken to a local eye hospital for surgery. Luckily she was found just in time. As a result, Ritu can now attend her school and is able to lead a fully independent life. Getting her sight back really was nothing short of a miracle. It costs just £27 to perform a simple 20-minute cataract operation and restore a child’s vision.

More information on Sightsavers Sunday can be found on www.sightsavers.org