South-East Asia and the Western Pacific region, as determined by the World Health Organization, have the greatest need for assistance for vision impairment and blindness in the world.

The solution to giving sight to the people of these regions involves having enough eye health personnel to treat them. The ICEE strategy is to create a range of education models that can train the various kinds of eye care personnel necessary to manage this task. The models are comprehensive education programmes that possess all the necessary information, implementation guidelines and course manuals to train eye health workers in the knowledge and skills necessary to provide a particular eye care service.

All ICEE activities – eye examinations, dispensing glasses, training eye care workers, negotiating with governments – provide data that contributes to the development of these models. Specific research projects are undertaken to investigate different aspects of eye care delivery systems as well as the efficacy of training models, in order to create more effective eye care delivery systems.