The Unofficial British Royal Family Pages

Speech given by The Countess of Wessex at the Business Traveller Awards, London, 21 September 2004

Ladies and Gentlemen, I am most grateful to Business Traveller for inviting me to present your Awards today.

I have attended a number of industry awards in the past and one cannot under-estimate the impact receiving such recognition has on a company. It isn't just the ability to hold your head up in front of your peers; it has far reaching effects throughout each organization as a whole. It is also an opportunity for the company to say thank you to its staff and customers, and probably to the many long suffering husbands, wives and partners who have endured solitary dinners, cancelled plans and early mornings as a result of their partners' commitment to their work. At long last you will be able to say it has been worth it, so well done to all of you who are about to join me on stage.

The reason I am here, of course, is not just to recognize your wonderful achievements but to acknowledge Business Traveller's support of VISION 2020: the Right to Sight, of which I am Patron and to tell you more about this important charity which aims to eradicate avoidable blindness across the world with the unashamed message that we need your help.

Recently I visited Tanzania to allow me to see first hand what this charity is doing in the field and to meet the vision 2020 partners working in Dar es Salaam and the region of Kilimanjaro. I began my visit at a rural eye clinic in Boma 'N' Gombe at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro where about 200 men, women and children were waiting to have their eyes checked. Many of those at the clinic had come long distances to be seen. Some had even walked for two days to reach the clinic.

Most of the older patients had been suffering severe eye problems for some time and many of them had had to be persuaded to come even though they were suffering great pain. Too many of them, including children, had come too late for anything to be done to save their sight.

I saw an elderly woman with trachoma being operated on under local anaesthetic in the back of a Land Rover. Being somewhat squeamish I had to steel myself to watch this simple but sight-saving operation. Afterwards she told me how happy she was to be out of pain after so long and was planning to come back again to have her other eye done soon. She had come by bus from her village 3-4 hours away and would have to endure the same hot, dusty and bumpy journey home, but she was smiling and happy and for her the journey had changed her life.

Abdul Shabhan was a 16-month old Masai boy with cataracts, whose endearing gestures of greeting me by placing his hand on my head and his winning cheeky grin totally captivated the photographers present. The doctors told me that, as his mother had brought him in early enough, they were confident that his condition was treatable, and as a result he would be able to lead a normal productive life instead of a bleak future in his village without sight. Several other children whom I saw had less positive prognoses.

However, what was really impressive was that around 20 people seen that day were transported to the Eye Hospital in Moshi, about 20 minutes away by minibus, to have immediate operations and treatments all aimed at either restoring their sight or preventing them form losing it.

At the eye hospital I had the opportunity to meet the wonderful, dedicated surgeons who operate on three patients in theatre at any one time and perform more well in excess of 20 operations in the morning! While this sounds like a better service than you might find in a developed country, there is a simple reason. If the clinic doesn't act quickly and lets people go home and wait their turn, the chances are that they will not come back and it will be too late to save their sight.

Tanzania is working hard to improve its blindness prevention programme, but the ones I saw are very much the lucky few.

Allow me to throw in a few statistics which might help you understand the mountain we have to climb. The number of people in the world today who are needlessly blind is estimated at 45 million; another 135 million have low vision, which means that nearly 180 million people across the world have some degree of visual impairment. 90% of them live in the poorer countries of the world where they are 5-10 times more likely to go blind than those living in the developed world. It is estimated that at least 7 million people become blind each year and yet, with simple, basic, cost effective and timely medical attention, their blindness would be avoidable.

Blindness is a life threatening condition for those in underdeveloped countries. There are no social benefits to help look after, feed and cloth them and very few jobs exist for visually impaired people in the third world.

This is why VISION 2020, along with our partners including Sight Savers International, Helen Keller International, Orbis and International Trachoma Initiative are working hard to try to turn the increasing tide.

So how can you help? Well like any other charity we desperately need funds to help us do our work and I hope that by giving you a little taste of what is going on in just one country I might have inspired you to find out a little bit more about us with a view to considering VISION 2020 worthy of your support corporately or personally. We are very grateful to a number of organisations which have supported us already including British Airways, KLM and Zan Air, as well as Business Traveller which has made VISION 2020 its chosen charity and is holding an auction for us in the magazine.

Thank you for allowing me to take up a little of your time today, congratulations in advance to all the Award winners and please remember that everyone everywhere has the right to sight.