Our Mission

ORBIS International is a nonprofit humanitarian organization that works in developing countries to save sight worldwide. ORBIS prevents and treats blindness through hands-on training, public health education, improved access to quality eye care, and partnerships with local health care organizations.

About Us

The gift of sight is priceless, life-changing and at the heart of what we do. ORBIS works in some of the world’s most under-served areas to deliver sight by strengthening local eye care institutions, training staff, introducing ophthalmic technology, advocating for supportive policies and increasing public awareness about eye health. Since 1982, ORBIS has carried out programs in 90 countries, enhanced the skills of more than 300,000 eye care professionals and provided treatment to more than 18.8 million blind and visually impaired people.

Tagesech Teshome, an eye care teacher in Ethiopia, gives an eye exam.

Partnerships essential to program success

As part of ORBIS’s broad-based capacity building program, our organization works with carefully selected local partners on projects typically lasting at least three years. ORBIS has approximately 100 active partners. These include hospitals, health centers, universities and training centers, local non-governmental organizations (NGOs), eye banks and government health departments.

ORBIS volunteer faculty correct- ed three-year-old Thi Phang  Ngo's strabismus on board the Flying Eye Hospital. Prior to this demonstration, eye doctors from the Da Nang Eye Hospital in Vietnam had little hands-on training in this type of surgery.

ORBIS long-term capacity building projects are taking place in Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, China, Ethiopia, India, Jamaica, Nepal, Peru, Vietnam, South Africa and Zambia. Additional projects are underway in many other countries around the globe. All projects are geared toward making a lasting impact and allowing activities to continue long after ORBIS assistance has ended.

Donors provide time, energy and expertise, funding and gifts in kind

To provide such a vast array of capacity building programs over an ever-increasing terrain, ORBIS relies on an active pool of roughly 500 volunteer faculty members to provide clinical and technical expertise at local hospitals as well as onboard it's Flying Eye Hospital — a one-of-a-kind ophthalmic surgical and training center located within a DC-10 aircraft. ORBIS uses volunteer pilots from FedEx and United Airlines to transport the Flying Eye Hospital from one destination to the next.

As a 501(c)(3) charitable organization, ORBIS relies on financial and gift-in-kind donations from individuals, corporations and foundations to help fund its urgently needed sight-saving programs.