The World Congress on Refractive Error and Service Development is an opportunity for the blindness prevention and eye care community to provide leadership, by evaluating current strategies and developing new approaches for this vitally important global public health challenge.
The World Congress is a forum to strategize the eradication of unnecessary vision impairment and discuss the broader development implications of providing eye care in developing communities throughout the world.
Across the world developing communities are confronted by poverty and its drastic repercussions on levels of blindness, vision impairment and eye care in general.
The situation highlights the need to define global eye care priorities; to adapt interventions to suit those countries in most need and focus attention on broader strategies to achieve sustainable, integrated solutions that transcend the boundaries of eye care and encompass social, political and economic solutions.
The World Congress recognises that poverty requires a multi-faceted approach to its eradication and challenges organisations and governments to meet community needs so that eye care activities can be provided within the broader development paradigm.
World leaders from civil society organisations involved in poverty eradication and development programmes will address the conference.
Subsequent discussions will be guided by this forum and aim to define a practical agenda for uncorrected refractive error which is located within a development paradigm.
