Message from ICEH

Despite being a relatively new NGO, and a new player in the field of blindness prevention in Bangladesh, the Child Sight Foundation has been doing truly excellent and innovative work over the last few years. One of the strengths of CSF is that the staff come from a range of backgrounds, and they bring their expertise and experience to bear on how activities are planned and organized, coming up with new and innovative ideas and solutions. The staff now have a wide range of skills, ranging from interviewing the parents of children who are blind and the blind children themselves, conducting house to house surveys to identify children who are blind, training key informants, networking with an extremely wide range of organizations, agencies and service providers, running national workshops, using qualitative information to develop and field test health education materials, and maintaining a database of the blind children they have identified. Indeed, developing and refining the key informant method for finding blind children in the community (and training other organizations in use of the method) is CSF’s the main achievement, and over the two years covered by this report CSF identified 2,846 blind children. Many of these children were referred to partner eye hospitals for sight restoring surgery – the vast majority of these children would have remained blind without the tireless and committed work of CSF staff.

I wish CSF all the very best as they continue in their excellent work, and I am sure that when the time comes to the next report in 2 years time that they will have even more new initiatives to report!

Clare Gilbert MBChB, FRCOphth, MD, MSc
Acting Head, International Centre for Eye Health
Reader in International Eye Health
International Centre for Eye Health,
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London.