What Does Sightsavers Do?

Sightsavers is an international charity that works to prevent avoidable blindness, fight disease, and support equality for women, girls, and people with disabilities. It operates in more than 30 countries across Africa and Asia, training health workers, providing eye operations, and running programmes that go beyond eye care into disability rights and community health. If you want to understand where a donation goes or what kind of work the organisation actually carries out, the sections below cover its main areas of activity and how it reports on them.

Preventing avoidable blindness and fighting disease

Sightsavers' founding focus is sight. Its work includes training health workers and providing eye operations so that people who would otherwise lose their vision — often from treatable or preventable causes — can keep it.

A major part of this is tackling trachoma, an infectious disease that can lead to blindness. Sightsavers describes a leadership role in trachoma elimination efforts, and its materials include an explainer on the history of the disease and a virtual tour of a rural surgery camp where operations take place. The organisation frames this as turning ambition into measurable progress rather than one-off treatment.

The practical shape of this work, based on the charity's own descriptions:

• Training local health workers so eye care capacity stays in the community
• Providing eye operations, including surgical camps in rural areas
• Disease control programmes, with trachoma elimination as a named priority

Disability rights and inclusion

Sightsavers states that it starts with sight but does not stop there. Beyond clinical eye care, it campaigns for disability rights and inclusion so that everyone can participate equally in society.

This includes campaigning work and project-level inclusion efforts. The charity highlights stories of people with disabilities building livelihoods — for example, Ruth, who has a visual impairment and now runs several small businesses after struggling to earn a living. It also profiles disability inclusion champions to show how projects change conditions on the ground.

Women's health and equality

Supporting equality for women and girls is listed as a core part of the mission alongside sight and disability. Sightsavers describes work to improve women's health as one of its programme areas, recognising that health access and gender inequality are connected — a woman who cannot access eye care or who is excluded from economic life faces compounding disadvantages.

How the work is funded and where money goes

Sightsavers is transparent about its spending split, which is useful if you are deciding whether to donate:

The charity offers several ways to support it: one-off donations, corporate partnerships, fundraising, and legacy gifts left in a will. It also runs a TV appeal and seasonal campaigns such as World Sight Day.

How to learn more or get involved

If you want to go deeper before committing:

• Read the annual reports for formal accounts of how the organisation is run and what it achieves
• Follow the blog and stories for case studies and expert commentary on eye health, disease, and inclusion
• Explore campaign pages if disability rights and inclusion are your main interest
• Consider a legacy gift if you want support to continue over the long term

Sightsavers' own framing is that it starts with sight but does not stop there — so the most accurate way to understand it is as an eye health charity that also works on disease, disability rights, and gender equality, rather than a single-issue organisation.