 Hello and welcome to this course on Global Blindness, Planning and Managing I Care Services. My name is Daksha Patel and I'm the lead educator throughout this course. In this course, we will describe the global picture of visual impairment and blindness and also look at the strategies that can be applied to manage blindness at a local level. Each week I will introduce you to the content. We will use a range of activities such as videos, interviews with experts, reading articles, doing quizzes and also a case study for the application of learning. In this first week, we will begin by describing some basic principles of epidemiology and the WHO definition for visual impairment and blindness. And then using this information, we will begin by considering how big is this problem of visual impairment and blindness, where and who is affected by it and what are the main causes. In this week, we have a presentation by Professor Alan Foster in which he highlights some of the lessons that were learned from the Gambia Eye program.