Seeing is Believing: a proud legacy in vision
Seeing is Believing at Standard Chartered, Director Victoria Jory
Victoria Jory is the Director of Seeing is Believing at Standard Chartered, which is one of the Vision Catalyst Fund’s founding partners. She writes for us as a guest blogger and looks back on a partnership that began in 2003 to fund 28,000 cataract operations that became a legacy that has helped millions of people who have vision impairment around the world.
Seeing is Believing Funded Eye Clinic in Kenya
Partnership and collaboration have been at the heart of Standard Chartered’s approach to eye health since it first committed to fund 28,000 cataract operations for people across its markets, back in 2003.
It was colleagues, working together for their communities, who first started Seeing is Believing (SiB), our global initiative to tackle visual impairment. It was a way to celebrate a major Bank anniversary and to fundraise for a good cause – supporting people living with avoidable blindness and visual impairment.
Four years into the programme, the Bank realised that if it were to achieve its growing desire to support more eye health projects across its footprint, it would need a partner. To achieve this ambitious goal, Standard Chartered and the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness (IAPB) came together to create a rare global-local partnership between the private sector and a non-governmental organisation. A visionary partnership was born.
I’m not sure anyone could have imagined that 17 years after it began, SiB would have raised more than USD100 million and be a global, multi-stakeholder partnership that has reached 212.7 million people across 38 countries in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and South America.
The success of this unique initiative has been underpinned by the sustained commitment of Standard Chartered employees to raise funds for SiB and the focus on the strong programme delivery by IAPB and its members – all supported by a global and local network across the Bank’s footprint.
As we near the conclusion of our final SiB projects with IAPB, we are recognising SiB’s tremendous impact and looking forward to the future to see how SiB’s collaborative approach will live on in its many legacy activities.
The Legacy of SiB
The Bank is continuing to prioritise people with visual impairments in its community programmes through Futuremakers by Standard Chartered, its new global initiative to tackle inequality through education, employability and entrepreneurship programmes.
Meanwhile, ‘Seeing is Believing by Standard Chartered’ will continue SiB’s legacy delivering eye health projects in India and mobilising support for the Vision Catalyst Fund (VCF) on its important mission to integrate eye care into health services.
The work of the VCF is more urgent than ever. The COVID-19 pandemic could have far-reaching implications for the profile of all health issues, including eye health. We do not want to lose momentum at a time when, according to figures from The World Health Organization’s World Report on Vision, we need to do more not less.
At Standard Chartered, we are looking forward to using the knowledge and experience we gained from SiB, and our 13-year partnership with IAPB and its members, to continue to work collaboratively for new visionary partnerships for eye health in the spirit of SiB.