July has been a relatively quiet month for me, although the irony has been that the heat and humidity of my small, un-airconditioned hotel room in Geneva (for a WHO meeting about the strategy of Vision 2020 for the next 5 years) was far in excess of anything I have experienced in Africa!

The Geneva meeting brought together many eyecare agencies and ophthalmological societies with WHO. One of the great things about this sector is that the NGOs collaborate with one another to try to ensure that we work more effectively against the common enemy of avoidable blindness, rather than competing to say ‘I did more cataract operations than you’. It is a refreshing change from the commercial environment I worked in before Sightsavers.

A number of important themes came out, particularly around our priorities for which diseases to concentrate on. Our fight against trachoma and river blindness is really bearing fruit, with the numbers of people suffering from these diseases (mainly in Africa) on the decrease. Obviously we need to continue our work to ensure this trend isn’t reversed, but it also means that other causes such as diabetic retinopathy and glaucoma are now much more significant from a percentage point of view. The whole eyecare community has been taken by surprise to see how diabetic retinopathy is increasing significantly even in developing countries – notably in Asia, as it had been perceived wisdom that diabetes was only a real problem for those living Western lifestyles.

We therefore agreed that we must put more resources into these diseases, even though they are more difficult to treat in the field.

Another key theme was that refractive error (simple short or long sight) actually affected a huge number of people. Lack of access to glasses means that many people in developing countries are effectively blind just for want of spectacles. WHO should soon be releasing some research showing just how many people are in this position, but early indications are that the numbers are shocking.

At Sightsavers we intend to scale up our work in this area. We do not send second hand glasses overseas – this really doesn’t make sense as it costs less to import new ones in bulk from places like India and China, and these are usually much better. By the time you have cleaned and sorted old spectacles, the cost is uneconomic in comparison. We are looking at how we can get appropriate glasses to people, particularly children of 11 – 15, being the age when refractive error usually develops in earnest and starts to have an impact. Of course this is when it can then hamper their education and which can have lifelong implications.

In July we have also welcomed two new trustees to Sightsavers – David Sands Smith, who has many years of experience working for DFID overseas, and John Lafferty, an extremely impressive Glaswegian judge, who has been completely blind since his twenties.

Next month I shall be travelling to Uganda, where I will be visiting schools and eye hospitals and getting an understanding of the challenges we face there.

Last week was Sightsavers Annual Meeting, where the Country Representatives from our overseas offices all congregate in a Brighton hotel to share experiences and learn from each other. It is always a tremendous experience for me as I get the chance to talk to the people who actually deliver our work overseas and who understand the real problems and challenges we face on the ground. Our Country Reps are employed locally (we aren’t an organisation that employs armies of ex pats!) and they have a deep understanding of the issues their countries face.

We started the meeting with a piece from me setting the scene and letting people know how we are doing so far in 2006. I had good news to tell, as our income so far this year is up compared to the same time last year. We still need much more though as we only really scratch the surface of the need that is out there. We were all very pleased about the resolution passed by the WHO recently to priorities the prevention of blindness. It gives us a great platform which we can use to persuade governments to put more money into their eyecare budgets (or in some cases to put in anything at all!)

We covered a range of issues from the need to ensure our own people were getting the training they needed to be effective to rather more mundane things like how to manage accounting and IT across an organisation working in so many different countries. We also discussed how we could increase our fundraising activities, in particular how we might expand our fundraising base beyond the UK and Ireland and how we could get more money from donors such as DFID (the UK Department for International Development).

We then spent quite a bit of time looking at how we could make sure that the programmes we develop will last for the long term. The best measure of our success in a country would be if we could leave it and put our money into a more needy place, safe in the knowledge that we had left behind eyecare services which would be able to continue without us. It is of course very difficult and there are no easy answers...

Finally we started the process of pulling together our next Strategic Plan – quite a big challenge when we have so many organisations to consult to make sure we are going in the right direction.

We sometimes worry about whether holding meetings like this is a good use of funds, but any fears I had were definitely allayed by the experience. Email and phones are wonderful inventions, but at the end of the day the benefits of people all meeting together to compare notes and make sure they learn from each others experiences and not just their own are incalculable.

For me, though, the highlight of the week was a dinner at my flat in Brighton which I gave for our Regional Directors. The four of them (from India, South East Asia and two from Africa) together with our Director of Overseas Programmes were treated (subjected?) to my cooking. It was a beautiful warm evening, and a marvellous opportunity for me to get a real understanding of what our work is all about.