For the upcoming Eye News Dec/Jan 2025, our co-editor, David Lockington, had the opportunity to sit down with the CEO of IAPB, Peter Holland. We’re really excited to share this interview with you, which delves into Peter’s fascinating career and efforts to reduce and manage global issues contributing to vision loss. To this end, Peter and his team at the IAPB have worked tirelessly to get eye health on the global agenda, and we would like to share this extract that features some of his thoughts on both IAPB’s journey, and recent findings.
“When I joined IAPB, eye health wasn't high on the global agenda and it was a bit siloed away. We were very good at talking to one another, but we were really struggling to get ourselves heard by policy and decision makers. And if you're talking at the UN or within the World Health Organization, inevitably there are lots of other priorities out there. So, you're really battling to get on the agenda.
“One of the things we began to [talk about] is the relationship and the impact that eye health and eyecare has on the sustainable development goals [SDGs] – essentially making the case that eye health isn't just a health issue – it's an issue that cuts across a whole range of other areas as well. [Eye health] impacts on work, it impacts on education, it impacts on daily life. Essentially that allowed us to go into those forums and make the case that eye health isn't just about healthcare. [Eye health] is about all these other things that you need to do and that you've signed up to doing, and if you don't get eyecare right, you're not going to achieve these [SDGs], which have targets for 2030.
“That worked, and people began to pay attention, and [it was] the first time the UN ever talked about eyecare – and they passed a UN resolution in the UN General Assembly on the importance of our health and vision. This was supported by some fantastic ambassadors in New York who really became very committed to the issue and supported us.
“That was a really important shift in terms of making the case, and several weeks ago on World Sight Day we published a report in partnership with Seva (one of our member organisations and a brilliant NGO who work all around the world on eyecare) looking at the impact of our [eye] health on our education, which is quite striking.
“There are 17,000,000 children who go to school [with] uncorrected refractive error – so they haven't had their eyes screened and don't have the glasses that they need. We know that children who are in that position learn about half as much as children whose vision is OK, or who have glasses. It's an immediate and direct impact on their educational attainment and what they can achieve. That has long-term and real knock-on implications; it means that they are much less likely to earn as much as their peers who have access to eyecare. The research and the evidence that we published shows that, as a global average, if you have access to eyecare, you earn 78% more over a lifetime. In the UK that figure is 95% – [an] even bigger difference than it is globally.
"From that lack of education, the global economy loses $173 billion a year; in the UK, the loss is $5 billion. This is quite a straightforward thing for the government’s growth agenda – make sure that everybody has access to glasses and it adds to their income and GDP – but it's that impact on individual lives I think that is really so shocking.
“And it's not just an individual tragedy, it’s a huge injustice because this is something that can be straightforward to sort out. It's about eye screening. It's about access to glasses. These are not difficult things to do. And again, the report shows that there's a return of about $65 for every dollar that's invested, so a return on investment of 65 times – it's up there with the best things you can put your money into.
“So how do we get these messages out there? One thing is that we are running the Glasses of the Future competition, which was a competition for children, inviting them from around the world to design glasses. Our panel of judges, including Caroline Casey, Jo Frost, Alberto Macciani, Elizabeth Kurian, Ruth Mugo, and Dr Prabha Choksey, will announce the winners on World Children's Day, 20 November 2024.”
