Standard Chartered presents spectacles to schoolchildren

Standard Chartered Bank in partnership with Sri Lanka's Ministry of Health distributed custom-made spectacles to around 400 schoolchildren from Colombo at a formal ceremony held on Monday.

The official handover was carried out by First Lady Shiranthi Rajapaksa at the Sri Lankan Foundation Institute Auditorium.

The initiative was part of Phase IV of the Bank-sponsored Colombo Urban Comprehensive Eye Care (CEC) project.

The project forms a wider initiative by the Bank, the Seeing is Believing (SiB) program, which is aimed at reducing avoidable blindness in the country.

In its current Phase, the SiB program will invest USD 20 million, half-raised and half-matched by the Bank, across 20 cities in the Bank's footprint to provide eye care services to 20 million people. Through Standard Chartered Bank Sri Lanka, USD 1 million will be granted to the country in 2010.

As part of Phase IV of the program, Bank volunteers assisted the Ministry to screen approximately 400 schoolchildren after which custom-made spectacles were purchased for them to meet their specific needs. Supported by SiB Funds, the CEC project aims at minimizing avoidable blindness, specifically targeting the growing problem of uncorrected refractive error.

The CEC project targets those living in poor urban communities and slums in the districts of Colombo and Kandy.

The Bank's implementation partners, Sight Savers International (SSI), the International Center for Eye Care Education (ICCE), and the Ministry of Health in Sri Lanka will work toward achieving this goal through a series of key objective: to strengthen access to primary eye care services among poor urban communities; to strengthen school eye health services; to establish within the communities the sustainable delivery of refractive error services through vision centers, optical labs, and workshops.

SiB is a partnership between Standard Chartered and the International Agency for Prevention of Blindness (IAPB).