Advocacy plays out at different levels in any initiative, essentially by creating an enabling environment, opening doors to required resources and actually helping in the implementation or delivery of services.

In this connection an important question that we seek to answer as policy makers, funding organisations, catalysts, enablers and service providers is what are the limiting factors that we can together remove so that eye care can actually reach the people? How can we work together synergistically to address the myriad issues?

It is in this context that LAICO together with IAPB and ICEH hosted the VISION 2020 workshop for the South East Asia Region on Advocacy in Eye Care with support from International NGO such as CBM, ORBIS, OPERATION EYESIGHT UNIVERSAL & Sightsavers.

Objectives:
The objectives of this workshop were:

• To identify the major issues in eye care that today are the limiting factors in providing efficient high quality eye care
• To seek to identify the major issues country wise for the South East Asia region
• To provide a platform to identify advocacy mechanisms in order to have the issue addressed

Outcomes:
The discussions on the overarching issues that affected eye care service delivery in each country identified the important barriers and brought forth the following advocacy road maps for the countries of:

• -   Bangladesh
• -  India
• -  Indonesia
• -  Sri Lanka

Further discussions on the important eye diseases brought out those problems that are specific to the effective treatment of each disease. The following shows the suggested advocacy mechanisms for improving the delivery of eye care pertaining to:

• -  Cataract
• -  Refractive Error
• -  Diabetic Retinopathy
• -  Pediatric Eye Care
• -  Glaucoma
• -  Eye Donation