Low vision services for children in Tanzania

The Kilimanjaro Centre for Community Ophthalmology (KCCO) has been involved in a five-year pilot project to improve low vision services for children in Tanzania.Low vision services were limited to a few tertiary hospitals and were accessible to only a few children. Children with low vision were usually enrolled in schools for the blind, most of them without having received an eye examination or refraction. In these schools, many teachers believe that reading “destroys your vision” and that children with low vision should learn to use Braille; they also believe that all visually impaired children “will lose their sight in the long run.” To address this, better provision of low vision services and better linkages between education and eye care were needed. To improve provision of low vision services, it was decided to integrate low vision into existing district and regional eye care services, and to train the many optometrists already working at regional or district (population about 1 million) level. One of the El iz ab et h Ki sh ik i