VAO announces new Strategy for next 10 years

VAO (Voluntary Aid Oversees) is happy to announce that they have worked on a New Strategy that we will follow for the next ten years!

Their goal is to support the achievement of Universal Eye Health Coverage with a focus on reducing visual impairment and blindness caused by Uncorrected Refractive Error – and theyhave significantly advanced the ambition and approach of Their work. They are proud of being a successful, growing charity and of the significant contributions they make to the societies they serve through their work.

Here is their reported strategy

A Clear Future in Sight – Our Strategy to 2030

What does ‘A Clear Future’ mean to us?

We have worked in collaboration with a number of our partners, members, and stakeholders to create a robust and dynamic strategy that truly reflects our hopes for the next 10 years. For us, as an organisation it is about building on the work we have already done and creating more opportunities, for communities across the countries we work in, to develop the resources and infrastructure they need to support eye care at all levels.

You can read our new Strategy to 2030 – A Clear Future in Sight here

What is our vision? We’ve developed three strategies!

For us to pursue greater achievements and help more people, we have created three strategies that we will follow in the next few years:

We will support the development of Human Resources for Eye Health (HREH). Since 2015, Vision Aid Overseas has engaged over 2,330 people in eye care related training. As an organization, we look into the requirements of each country, institution and individual. This means that we are strengthening the clinical skills of student optometrists, providing practical training to dispensing opticians and technicians, supporting universities to develop optometry course materials, providing scholarships to increase the number of qualified eye health personnel such as optometry technicians or optometrists, and training primary healthcare workers in Primary Eye Care.

We will strengthen essential eye health services at schools, communities, and vision centres. We focus on social enterprise development, new technology, supporting supply chains of affordable glasses and essential equipment, as well as assistive technologies for low vision. We also focus on promoting and strengthening local outreach services, the inclusion of eyecare in health insurance schemes and we want to engage with the private sector.

We understand the importance of having strong eyecare support. Did you know that Ethiopia has only 540 qualified optometrists serving a population over 100 million? Tackling this issue and helping across Africa will allow everyone to access eye health.

We will promote the engagement and mobilisation of communities. We want to increase awareness, knowledge, health seeking behaviour and demand for services. When community engaging, it is also necessary to reach and support vulnerable members of the same, who otherwise might not access eye care when it is available. We believe that by supporting communities we can spread awareness on the importance of eye health and make it known to people who need glasses.

What are our Clear Values?

At Vision Aid Overseas, we want to keep having our clear values in place, because we understand that is better to work towards the greater good! For this reason, we will continue to: