Istanbul, Turkey, 19 March 2018 – In preparation for the launching of the 2^nd phase (Generation II) of the Alliance to Fight Avoidable Blindness (AFAB), the IsDB Group Regional Hub Turkey in cooperation with the Islamic Solidarity Fund for Development, ISFD, hosted a Coordination Meeting in the city of Istanbul on 19-20^th March, 2018. The official launching of AFAB Generation II will take place on the sidelines of the 43^rd Annual Meeting of the Board of Governors of the IsDB Group in Tunis, 1-5 April, 2018.

The Hon. Under-Secretary of Health of the Republic of Turkey, H.E. Prof. Dr. Eyup Gumus delivered a key note speech at the opening of the AFAB Coordination Meeting (Generation II) at Swiss Otel, Istanbul, with participants from 32 different international, governmental, and non-governmental organizations from Turkey, Tunisia, Brazil, Morocco, Qatar, Egypt, Azerbaijan as well as the OPEC Fund for International Development (OFID), amongst them many elite ophthalmologists from the Republic of Turkey.

The 2^nd Generation of AFAB is a massive 5 year health project (2018-2022) at an estimated cost of US $30 million which aims to bring free of charge eye-care to hundreds of thousands of people in 12 African countries, namely; Burkina Faso, Chad, Guinea, Cote d’Ivoire, Djibouti, Comoros, Guinea Bissau, Mauritania, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, and Togo; all of them member countries of the IsDB Group.

The Alliance which is planning to perform many cataract surgical operations currently comprises IsDB Group’s ISFD in collaboration with its main following partners:

• The Humanitarian Aid Foundation -Turkey (IHH);
• The Union for the Prevention of Blindness - Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (PBU);
• The Egyptian Agency for Partnership for Development (EAPD);
• The International Development Agency of Azerbaijan (AIDA);
• The Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa (BADEA).

At the Coordination Meeting, Dr. Waleed Al Wohaib, Director General of ISFD, commented on the 2nd Generation of AFAB saying: “This alliance once again reflects our long-term vision to save lives and put an end to diseases causing vision loss. Moreover, through this health project, we planned to perform around 100,000 cataract surgical operations and provide comprehensive, accessible and sustainable eye care services in 12 African countries. However, in the upcoming 5 years, the new initiative will work along pronged strategies to keep fighting preventable eye diseases at the top by developing intervention programs for the correction of refraction and it will carry out examinations to detect ocular refraction errors, maintain the progress and raise capacity building activities to fulfill the mission.”

The first phase of AFAB was implemented during 2008-2015 in 8 African countries namely Benin, Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Chad, Djibouti, Guinea, Mali and Niger providing eye care to 244,000 people, restoring eyesight to more than 49,000 blind people from different age groups.