Success Stories

In October 2015, Qatar Charity launched a fundraising campaign to support the sight-saving work of Orbis in Bangladesh. There are 7.4 million people in Bangladesh who are blind or visually impaired. Cataract is the most common cause of blindness there and around 5,000 children are diagnosed each year. While cataract is easily treated with surgery, 75% of the population lives in rural areas of Bangladesh, where a simple trip to the optometrist can become an almost impossible feat. With a limited number of ophthalmologists, Bangladesh also faces daunting challenges in delivering quality eye care to its population. Qatar Charity's first fundraising campaign focused on a programme to strengthen the quality and sustainability of eye care services in Dhaka and three underserved districts: Jamalpur, Naogaon and Barisal. Thanks to Qatar Charity’s funding, throughout the life of the project, 21 much-needed new cataract surgeons received training. Nurses also completed almost a hundred trainings in clinical, nursing and training management. As a result of these educational opportunities, the number of surgeries performed increased each year, totalling 48,103. Hundreds of front line workers and community volunteers were also trained. These ‘unsung heroes’ have worked tirelessly to identify and refer people with vision loss symptoms, raise awareness and ensure their community has access to quality eye care services. Thanks to more than a hundred outreach programmes, new visions centres and these trained unsung heroes, 1,088,239 people accessed the eye health facilities during the life of the project to receive the treatment they needed! Testimonial - Through this programme, Dr. Sohel Mahmud, now the Senior Medical Officer at Ispahani Islamia Eye Institute and Hospital (IIEI&H), successfully completed a 15-month fellowship training in cataract surgery. During his fellowship he carried out almost a thousand cataract surgeries, attended a series of theoretical and practical/surgical sessions, including Wet Lab, sterilization procedure, orientation on comprehensive ophthalmic examination, and had exposure to different sub-specialty such as cornea, glaucoma, retina etc. In addition to developing skills for his cataract surgeries, Dr. Sohel has had the opportunity to get exposure in complicated and difficult cataract cases to efficiently manage pre-operative and post-operative complications. The successful completion of the training has empowered Dr Sohel in becoming a trainer of other doctors in cataract surgery – he says: “This programme is very much benefitting our country and hospitals. In generating more trained cataract surgeons we are able to take on high volume quality cataract surgeries. The cataract surgeon will act as a soldier in the war against avoidable blindness.”