We are a volunteer-based organization, our mission is to make quality eye care accessible to all, regardless of their ability to pay.
A New Vision (ANV) was registered in 2011 after a few of us held our first cataract surgical outreach in December 2010 where 625 sights were restored. ANV has completed 16,000 cataract surgeries to date.
Based on the World Health Organization, among 285 million of the visually-impaired, two-thirds are female. We would expect the patient ratio to be 35% male, and 65% female.
However, our outreach records shows that patient ratio to be 60% male, and 40% female.
This discrepancy is due to blind female not receiving the same opportunity for treatment as male. It is not difficult to imagine what kind of risks and threats a blind female faces.
WHY INDONESIA?
Based from the statistics from World Health Organization, Indonesia is ranked as the second in cases of blindness after Ethiopia.
Also, 80% of the world’s blindness can be cured (50% is caused by cataracts, 30% by refractive errors), ie. 4 out of 5 people who are blind need not remain blind.
Restoring the sight of one blind woman will change her life and her family’s. A woman who loses her sight often loses her husband. She’d return to her mother's home with her young children and they become dependent on her mother; or her eldest child has to leave school to look for work.
All these tragedies could be averted by a 10-minute cataract surgery costing US$100. This has been a proven result for many of our outreach programmes.
