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How much less do children learn in school if they don’t have the glasses they need? When I was 6 my mum noticed I couldn’t read a sign at distance (we were going to get ice cream, and I couldn’t tell her which one I wanted)! She took me to the optometrist and within a week, I had a new pair of glasses. At school, my view of the blackboard switched from the blurry view on the left, to the much clearer view on the right.
In our new report for World Sight Day, co-led by Seva Foundation, we make a first attempt to estimate the global loss of learning from uncorrected refractive error in schools.
Using a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized-controlled-trials we estimate that a child with uncorrected refractive error learns approximately half as much as a child with good or corrected vision.
This equates to 6.3 million equivalent years of schooling lost annually with 80%+ of this loss in low-and-middle-income countries. The estimated future global productivity loss of uncorrected refractive error in school-going children is $173 billion (PPP) per year.
While this report underscores the substantial societal loss from uncorrected refractive error, the good news is that eyeglasses are a proven, low cost and scaleable intervention to address the problem, and could help boost learning in global education.
Huge thanks to my co-authors Parami Dhakhwa and Bryce Everett for their great work on this report! And for the guidance from the IAPB team Anthea Burnett and Jude Stern.
