SightFirst accomplished what few thought possible. It has been extraordinarily effective in controlling and in some places eliminating the leading causes of unnecessary blindness. It is crucial that SightFirst continues its work, but £87.5 million of the £100 million available for projects has already been spent.
SightFirst played a crucial role in helping to reduce preventable blindness, but, there are still 34 million blind today, and another 124 million suffer from low vision. A tragic figure - yet a smaller one than when our SightFirst programme began its mission 16 years ago! So it was decided to launch SightFirst II in order to raise at least £100 million.
Experts predict that if we do not act now, the world's blind population will double by 2020.
So once again Lions Clubs throughout the world have been asked to accept the challenge to raise the necessary funds to carry on the work that we were challenged to do by Helen Keller all those years ago.
