Almost 150,000 Rohingya Refugees and Local Community in SE Bangladesh Access Vital Eye Care

Our Qatar Charity supported project, has provided almost 150,000 eye tests for people in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, in just under two years.

This project provides vital services for the Rohingya refugees and local host population at free or subsidised costs and has led to just under 27,000 sight saving surgeries, medicines distributed and glasses prescribed.

The programme, funded by Qatar Charity, has been strengthening the eye health network by supporting people from the community to be trained in how to spot eye conditions, from teachers to religious leaders, to frontline health workers. So far, 220 people have received crucial training, which has help drive those struggling with their vision to available treatment.

The programme has faced many setbacks over the last year, including a large fire, cyclone, and increasing security risks due to violence within the camps. In spite of these difficulties, our local partners worked hard to find ways to continue to reach those in need of treatment and surgery for sight loss, growing the programme by 26% in 2023. The fire and cyclone resulted in thousands of people being displaced. We worked with camp authorities to track down patients, to ensure people did not miss out their promised sight saving treatments or follow up appointments.

Bangladesh is a densely populated country of 160 million. Over sixty percent of the population live in rural, remote areas, including Cox’s Bazar. Eye care services can be stretched as the majority of ophthalmologists are located within cities. With around 1 million refugees in the area, the further development and expansion of eye health services is vital, to serve both the local host community as well as the Rohingya population, many of whom have never had access to medical care before.

Orbis and Qatar Charity have collaborated on a previous successful programme in Bangladesh, thanks to the generosity of donors from across Qatar. Between 2015 and 2020, more than a million people accessed eye health facilities to receive eye tests or treatments, and through the training of many new ophthalmologists and nurses, the number of surgeries in the programme area increased each year, totalling more than 48,000.

Rebecca Cronin

Orbis UK CEO

2023 proved to be a very hard year for the Rohingya refugees and the local Bangladeshi com­mu­ni­ty who, if life wasn’t tough enough already, have had to con­tend with fires, secu­ri­ty risks and extreme weath­er events. These sit­u­a­tions are stress­ful but imag­ine expe­ri­enc­ing a cyclone with poor eye­sight? We’ve con­tin­ued to see this pro­gramme grow, thanks to the gen­er­ous sup­port of Qatar Char­i­ty. This project makes such an impor­tant dif­fer­ence to these com­mu­ni­ties. In the first three months of this year alone, over 23,000 eye tests have been pro­vid­ed. Eye tests and treat­ments mean we can help to pro­tect liveli­hoods and those in edu­ca­tion from the impact of untreat­ed vision loss.
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