The Provost of the College of Art and Social Sciences, Prof. Dr. Dr. Daniel Bour has called for aggressive, proactive and efficacious interventions to save low income countries from escalating socio-economic burden and environmental decay. He has therefore called for major interventions to prevent the number of blind people worldwide from increasing from the current 45 million to the projected 76 million by the year 2020.
Prof. Dr. Dr. Daniel Buor stated that approximately 314 million people world wide live with serious vision impairment, of which 124 million people are with low vision , with 153 million people visually impaired due to uncorrected refractive errors. Again, 90 percent of blind people live in low-income countries and women face a significantly greater risk of vision loss than men. Prof. Dr. Dr. Bour gave these statistics at the commissioning of the Ashanti Vision Care Centre at Ayeduase near KNUST.
The Provost of the College of Science, Prof. Aboagye Menyeh stated that 500 million people need presbyopic correction in Africa. He said eye care is a big issue because the rate of blindness in Africa is about seven times higher than the rest of the world and more seriously 36 million of the world’s blind persons live in Africa and other developing nations and it is in that light that the International Centre for Eye care Education (ICEE) has developed the vision centre to provide affordable eye care to the Ayeduase community.
The Chief of Ayeduase, Nana Opoku Agyemang Bawuah Nsafo III, thanked the University especially the Department of Optometry and the International Centre for Eye care Education for setting up a vision centre with state of the art equipment to serve Ayeduase and its surrounding communities.
The Ashanti Vision Centre is a community based project through the collaborative effort of the International Centre for Eye care Education (ICEE), the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) the Ghana Health Service and the Ayeduase community. The Ashanti Vision Centre is being funded by the International Centre for Eye care Education (ICEE).
