Celebrating World Sight Day 2024

World Sight Day 2024 was a moment filled with incredible energy and enthusiasm. This year’s focus on children’s eye health inspired children everywhere to love their eyes. We campaigned to ensure that children understood the importance of caring for their eye health, and to draw the attention of those in influential positions to recognise that early intervention and regular eye health is critical to unlocking education opportunities and future economic potential. I invite you to celebrate this year’s success.

Our ask to pledge to love your child’s eyes saw nearly two million pledges, surpassing our one million target. Each pledge was a promise to prioritise a child’s eye health and became part of the global movement calling for accessible, available and affordable eye care for all children. This year’s pledge numbers pushed the Love Your Eyes total pledges to over 25 million. An incredible number worth celebrating.

Globally, our members campaigned with one clear message and held vision screenings at schools and youth centres providing eye care and sharing eye health message with thousands of children and caregivers from Brazil to Zimbabwe.

Our collaboration with the SEVA Foundation released groundbreaking research that revealed the indisputable links between healthy eyesight, education attainment, lost school years, lifetime earnings and economic gains. This research reinforced that resources spent on public policies, like eye care for all, in early childhood have an incredibly positive return for society. These findings resonated worldwide and were covered in three thousand articles, reaching an audience of almost four million readers. Please take a moment to review this important research.

The UN Friend of Vision, and our mascot Artie, took eye health to the halls of the United Nations and UNICEF to build awareness for the profound impact of comprehensive child eye health policies and practices. As H.E Ambassador Fergal Mythen, Permanent Representative of Ireland to the UN & UN Friends of Vision Co-Chair stated, “Yes, today is about eye health, but it’s also about education, sustainable development, gender, but above all it’s about unleashing the potential of so many people.”

For this year’s campaign, we launched the Glasses of the Future Competition. An opportunity for young minds to design the next generation of glasses. Thousands of entries from around the world were submitted, each one an amazing display of creativity. The winning design, celebrated on International Day of the Child, serves as a powerful reminder that glasses improve not just a child’s sight but their confidence, performance at school and safety.

We thank HRH The Duchess of Edinburgh who brought World Sight Day into thousands of homes with a special CBeebies Bedtime Story. She read Specs for Rex, written by Yasmin Ismail. A beautiful story about a young lion who embraces his new glasses.

This year’s achievements, detailed in our campaign report, stand as a testament to the collective efforts of our Love Your Eyes Global Partners, supporters, advocates, and campaigners around the world who are passionate about equitable eye care. Together, we continue to make the world take note that eye care is vital to everything.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank IAPB members and their incredible teams who each year bring World Sight Day to life. Their creativity, passion and dedication to the cause is inspiring.

Cheers to another fantastic campaign in 2024. As we look ahead to 2025, we can’t wait for what we will achieve together and look forward to sharing plans with you soon!