REAP Research - Vision Care
Vision Care
Overview
Of all children in the world with poor vision who lack glasses, half live in China. For more than a decade, REAP has studied the potential of vision correction to uplift rural populations. When we started our research in this area, we found that out of the 20 million Chinese students that needed glasses, only 1 in 7 had them. Since 2011, our research has shown that quality vision care is the most cost-effective intervention for improving child welfare and leads to large and sustainable increases in learning and school performance. We have also tested models of scaling vision services to meet the needs of China’s rural population, establishing a network of for-profit vision centers based at county hospitals through an initiative called Smart Focus. Policy advocacy based on our research has led to major policy change for school-based vision programs in China and informed China’s national children’s vision care program announced in 2018. The same research has also informed the addition of vision care to bilateral aid programs (USAID, DFID) and the UN’s sustainable development goals. In our current research, we continue to gather evidence on the link between vision correction and important outcomes such as high school attendance and mental health. In addition to studying school-aged populations in China, REAP also conducts research on the link between uncorrected vision and cognitive decline among the elderly.