Country Background: Living With
Visual Impairment In Ethiopia
Home / Info Zone /
Country Background: Living With Visual Impairment In Ethiopia
COUNTRY BACKGROUND: LIVING WITH VISUAL IMPAIRMENT IN ETHIOPIA
It is common knowledge that the cause and consequence of disabilities is poverty: Poor people
more often develop a disability and disabled people are above average subjected to poverty.
According to recent studies, about 4 Million out of the 75 Million inhabitants of Ethiopia live with
visual impairment: 1.6% is blind, 3.7% suffer from low vision, women generally are more affected
by visual impairment and blindness then men and 6% of the blind population are children.
Main causes for visual impairment and blindness are diseases like trachoma, cataract or refractive
error. However, man made risks such as minefields as well as social, economic and regional factors
also play a vital role in fact, 90% of the visual impairments are preventable or curable.
Being a blind person in Ethiopia causes daily hardships that are beyond any description.
Accessibility issues and inconvenient infrastructure as well as discrimination in educational
institutions and prejudices against people with disabilities lead to economical and professional
marginalization.
As visually impaired students mostly come from very disadvantaged backgrounds and
environments and suffer from societal and educational support, such as through lacking Braille and
audio study material, exemption from certain classes, dependency on the sighted in writing class
tests and assignments, they are more likely to drop out of school early or fail to succeed in their
anticipated studies. Besides this, persons with visual disabilities constantly face prejudice and
stigma in regard to their abilities, limiting their professional opportunities and leaving the majority
of people with visual impairments with little chances to escape poverty.
Photo-Gallery
Dancers
PreviousNext
123456789101112
Audio-Gallery
Audio Player
00:00
00:00
Use Up/Down Arrow keys to increase or decrease volume.
Video-Gallery
Video Player
00:00
00:00
© Copyright 2018 @ Together! Ethiopian! Residents Charity Organization. Developed by: Dereje L.
+2519-61-51-72-00
Welcome to Ethiopian National Association of
the Blind
The Ethiopian National Association of the Blind (ENAB) was established in 1960 with its
major objective to advance the respect of the universal human rights, equal
opportunities and full participation of blind Ethiopians.
ENAB is the first association of persons with disability in Ethiopia; it has more than
12,000 active members and 32 branch offices in 5 regions and 2 administrative cities. In
its fifty five years of operation, it has been performing various activities, among which
education is the one that the association is highly engaged in.
Since 1975, ENAB has been providing education services to an average of 200 blind
students annually through its two boarding elementary schools located in the region of
southern nations and nationalities of Ethiopia in a special place called Wolaita and in the
Oromia region in a special place called Bako from Kindergarten to eighth grade.
555
Purpose : To estimate global and regional prevalence estimates for
blindness and vision impairment (VI) that are important for development of
public health policies.
Methods : A systematic review and meta-analysis was conducted of
population-based datasets relevant to global VI and blindness from 1980.
Hierarchical models were fitted to estimate- by age, country, and year- the
2020 prevalence of (1) mild VI (presenting visual acuity worse than 6/12 to
6/18 inclusive), moderate to severe VI (MSVI; presenting visual acuity worse
than 6/18 to 3/60 inclusive), and blindness (presenting visual acuity worse
than 3/60); and (2) functional presbyopia (defined as presenting near vision
worse than N6 or N8 at 40cm where best-corrected distance visual acuity
was better than 6/12). Ninety-five percent uncertainty intervals (UI) were
calculated.
Results : Globally, among 7.79 billion people living in 2020, an estimated
49.1 million (95% UI: 39.0-61.3 million; 54% female) were blind (0.62%; 95%
UI:0.49%-0.78%), 221.4 million (95% UI: 197.7-247.0 million) people (2.81%;
95% UI:2.51%-3.13%; 55% female) had moderate VI, 33.6 million (95% UI:
29.7-38.0 million) people (0.43%; 95% UI:0.38%-0.48%; 57% female) had
severe VI. The estimated number of blind persons increased (by 42.8%) from
34.4 million in 1990 to 49.1 million in 2020 yet global all-age age-
standardised prevalence of blindness decreased between 1990 (0.85%; 95%
UI:0.68%-1.1%) and 2019 (0.60%; 95% UI:0.48%-0.75%). Greatest
reductions were observed in South Asia (-49%) and North Africa and Middle
East (-43%) with the smallest changes in high income regions.
Conclusions : There is an ongoing reduction in the age-standardised
prevalence of blindness and VI, yet the growth and ageing of the world’s
population is causing a substantial increase in number of people affected.
Notable inter-regional and gender inequalities exist which highlight the need
to scale up vision impairment alleviation efforts at all levels.
This is a 2020 ARVO Annual Meeting abstract.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-
NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
3,679Views
o ARVO.org
Copyright © 2015 Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology.
This site uses cookies. By continuing to use our website, you are agreeing
to our privacy policy.Accept
Resources
Assistive Devices
Softwares
Documents
Audio
Advertisements
Important Links
Podcasts
Tutorials
About Blindness
Voluntary Service
Find Lawyer or Consultant
Partners and Donors
Comment
Ask a Question
Copyright © ENAB, All rights reserved!
