Helen Keller International (HKI)

Currently 1 in 7 people worldwide are blind or living with some form of vision loss, yet a staggering 90% of vision loss is preventable or treatable. Vision loss can have an incredible impact on people's quality of life, impacting children and family members' ability to learn, form friendships, earn a living, and to remain safe. It can even set them on a course for generations of poverty. To protect vision, Helen Keller intl partners with communities and local health networks to improve their ability to provide high-quality eye health services to children and adults who don't have access to adequate, affordable care. In africa and asia, we train, equip, and provide ongoing support to clinicians helping them treat people with cataract, refractive error, and diabetic retinopathy. In the united states, we partner with schools and community-based organizations to provide vision screenings, eye exams, and prescription glasses for vulnerable children and adults. Last year we supported visions screenings for close to 150,000 students and vulnerable adults globally, of which 130,800 resided in the united states, and provided free eyeglasses to over 33,200 of those diagnosed with refractive error. In 14 countries around the world, Helen Keller is delivering vision-protecting vitamin a to millions of children, staving off blindness and building immune systems.

Neglected tropical diseases including blinding trachoma, lymphatic filariasis, river blindness, schistosomiasis, and intestinal worms impact more than 1 billion people globally. These mainly parasitic, viral, or bacterial diseases that can cause a host of painful physical disabilities, lost economic opportunities, and social stigma are most prevalent in lower income countries that lack adequate healthcare. Helen Keller intl partners with ministries of health, local leaders, and communities to prevent, treat, and eliminate these neglected diseases. A cornerstone of the work involves mass drug administration events where community health workers distribute critical medications to both treat and curb the spread of these diseases. During 2024 alone, we worked with ministries of health to treat more than 35 million individuals for at least one of these five diseases in seven african countries (burkina faso, cameroon, guinea, mali, niger, nigeria and sierra leone), contributing greatly to national efforts towards their control and elimination. Helen Keller is also involved in morbidity management and disability prevention related specifically to trachoma and lymphatic filariasis and is working to build the capacity of national government and partner organizations in this area in five african countries (mali, niger, nigeria, sierra leone and tanzania). In 2024, we screened close to 7,494 individuals for trachoma and supported surgery for over 2,400 people affected by a blinding condition resulting from trachoma (trichiasis). The combination of these Helen keller-supported efforts has led to the great success of mali eliminating trachoma as a public health problem in 2023; other countries continue to make progress in this direction with trachoma, lymphatic filariasis and onchocerciasis.

Today as many as 733 million people go to bed hungry every night. Ongoing stressors including climate change, rising inflation, and instability and conflicts around the world have made nutritious food unaffordable or inaccessible to millions of children and families at greatest risk. To reduce malnutrition, Helen Keller intl partners with governments, communities, community health workers, and community organizations in africa and asia to reach infants, children, mothers, and families with climate-smart farming training, breastfeeding support, assessment and treatment of malnutrition, complementary high-nutrient foods, and critical vitamins and nutrients like immune-building vitamin a. Last year, Helen Keller partnered with 14 african governments to reach over 43.7 million children under the age of five with two doses of vitamin a supplementation. We also continued our support to governments and private sector companies in large scale food fortification in several countries across africa (burkina faso, nigeria, and senegal) to explore fortification of bouillon cubes. We estimate having reached more than 2.1 million families with better access to micronutrient-rich foods since we first began supporting these approaches more than three decades ago.