The Vision Excellence Awards 2020

2020 has been on our collective minds for two decades. This year brings the end of a remarkable global initiative, VISION 2020: The Right to Sight, that brought many of us together. VISION 2020  also brought new attention to eye health, along with four World Health Assembly resolutions. It helped focus our attention on its three pillars: disease control, human resources and infrastructure. VISION 2020 also focused the need for an evidence-based approach to eye health advocacy.

Ultimately, the sector we work in today was shaped by VISION 2020. Over the past few years, we have built on its foundations to step beyond avoidable blindness and to include all aspects of vision impairment. During the next decade we will build further on VISION 2020’s success and the partnerships it fostered to achieve the goal of  universal access to eye health.

This year we celebrate VISION 2020’s successes and achievements. To do that, we are delighted to announce the Vision Excellence Awards. IAPB will celebrate individuals whose vision, drive, commitment and quality of work contributed to successful outcomes and continued learning from the VISION 2020 agenda. We encourage IAPB member organisations to nominate individuals whose contributions to advocacy, innovation, programme implementation, institution-building and disease control are at the heart of VISION 2020’s success.

This week’s newsletter includes a number of posts by people who helped shape the VISION 2020 agenda. We hope it gets you thinking about what VISION 2020 stands for. Please do share information about the awards with your teams and send in your nominations.