Through its focus on capacity building, ORBIS International offers its partner institutions in developing countries the resources they need to provide quality eye care that is affordable, accessible and sustainable. Through capacity building, ORBIS helps developing countries meet long-term needs.  

For ORBIS, capacity building takes the form of technical assistance and training in clinical care, hospital management, administration and finance. Capacity building is essential if the host country is to maintain and improve upon its advances on its own.

Because it depends upon long-term projects and programming, capacity building affects many more lives over the long run than is possible through short-term initiatives. 

Key strategies of capacity building

ORBIS's capacity building strategies include:

• Training eye care professionals in the prevention and treatment of eye diseases prevalent in their region and ensuring that these skills are effectively put into practice
  
  
• Strengthening the different types of eye care institutions, such as hospitals, medical schools and eye banks, so that they have the tools in place to continually deliver urgently needed eye care services
  
  
• Introducing health care financing systems, such as tiered payment plans, so that even the poorest of the poor can access sight-saving surgery
  
  
• Providing ophthalmic equipment, such as digital retinal cameras, indirect ophthalmoscopes and operating microscopes, and training staff to properly use and maintain this equipment
  
  
• Advocating on behalf of legislation promoting and supporting eye health on the national health care agenda
  
  
• Generating public awareness that some forms of blindness can be prevented or treated and don’t have to be accepted as fate

ORBIS has conducted more than 900 capacity building programs in its 26-year history. These capacity building programs were conducted through six country and regional-based offices, the Flying Eye Hospital, and ORBIS’s in-country, hospital-based training sessions.

The vision center to the right is the product of an ORBIS capacity building project in northwestern Bangladesh.

You can help

With your support, ORBIS can continue its capacity building efforts in developing countries around the world. Through a single contribution, you can help ensure that improvements to a region's eye care infrastructure have a lasting impact. Please give generously. Your contribution means so much to those in need.