Orbis Southern Africa Unclaimed

ORBIS Southern Africa is a Cape Town-based affiliate of ORBIS International. ORBIS International is a nonprofit global development organization dedicated to saving sight worldwide.ORBIS provides the tools, training and technology necessary for local partners to develop workable and lasting solutions to the tragedy of unnecessary blindness. The focus of ORBIS Southern Africa is to develop specialised services for children's eye health within the region.ORBIS is developing specialised child friendly centres and working in partnership with community eye health programmes to build efficient referal networks for children with complex sight problems to be found, refered, treated and followed up on throughout their lifetime.

According to Statistics South Africa, 435 109 people in South Africa have low vision but the majority of the ophthalmologists work in the urban areas and the private sector whereas the citizens most at risk live in rural areas. In Ethiopia, trachoma, an entirely preventable eye disease, is partly responsible for causing blindness in nearly a million people. Approximately 9 000 children in Ghana are blind – more than half these cases were avoidable.