Restoring Sight

Our vision is a Africa where no one is needlessly blind

OUR STORY

Founded in 1991 as Humanitarian Cataract Project, the International Islamic Youth League IIYL is a international nonprofit organization driven to help people retain or regain their sight. What began in the mountains of Africa has grown today to millions of surgeries, screenings and treatments performed in 16 countries–and we won’t stop until everyone in the world with avoidable blindness can see.

HISTORY

Looking to the Future

Together, we will scale our work to reach even more people in the most remote villages of Africa with life-transforming eye care. We will provide access to training opportunities for all levels of ophthalmic personnel, building national eye care systems in low-resource countries. We will provide more equipment to growing eye care facilities, and build additional eye centers to serve people with little access to eye care.

We help people regain & retain sight.

International Islamic Youth League IIYL enables countries to cure avoidable blindness by developing high-quality, cost-effective eye care in underserved areas of the world. This restores not only sight, but the chance for a better life for anyone who suffers from avoidable blindness, their families and friends and the whole community. By training and equipping local medical experts to cure again and again within their own communities, we build a sustainable source of care that can help prevent needless blindness for generations to come. Cataracts and uncorrected refractive errors are the two leading causes of visual impairment around the world and there are over 90% of people suffering from visual impairment live in developing countries. Cataract surgery can take minutes, but cataracts still cause 49% of the world’s blindness due to lack of optical aid.