Health

Sightsavers

Research summary, last reviewed May 2026. UK charity 207544 (England and Wales) and SC038110 (Scotland), Royal Charter RC000706. Official site.

Independent recognition: GiveWell Top Charity (deworming), six consecutive years · Charity Navigator 4/4 stars (US arm) · Giving What We Can recommended · Open Philanthropy grantee

Headline outcome: 497,182 cataract operations supported in 2024

What does Sightsavers do?

Sightsavers works on eye health, neglected tropical diseases and disability rights across more than 30 countries in Africa and Asia. In 2024 it supported 497,182 cataract operations, 9.9 million eye examinations, 872,922 pairs of spectacles and 103 million treatments for neglected tropical diseases, alongside training over 36,000 people with disabilities and supporting 5,480 children with disabilities in school. All services are free at the point of use, delivered in partnership with national health and education ministries.

The organisation was founded on 5 January 1950 by Sir John Wilson, who was blinded at the age of 12 in a school chemistry accident and went on to dedicate his life to preventing avoidable blindness worldwide. His wife and co-founder Lady Jean Wilson, who coined the term “river blindness” standing on a West African riverbed, remained an active vice-president until her death in January 2026, aged 103.

Why did EveryDrop choose it?

Sightsavers passed our four-stage vetting assessment: a clearly aligned charitable purpose (health, human rights and education), no evidence of undue private benefit, no evidence of public disbenefit, and no undue restrictions on access. It is registered with both the Charity Commission and Scotland’s OSCR, holds a Royal Charter, and its 2024 accounts were given an unqualified audit opinion. Trustees are unpaid, and the chief executive’s salary is below the benchmark for UK international charities of comparable scale.

Its independent record is exceptional. Sightsavers’ deworming programme has been a GiveWell Top Charity for six consecutive years, with Open Philanthropy awarding $11.2 million in 2023 for deworming in Nigeria, Chad and Cameroon. Its US arm holds a 4/4-star Charity Navigator rating. And it has been a substantial named partner in seven countries validated by the WHO as having eliminated trachoma as a public health problem: Ghana (2018), The Gambia (2021), Malawi (2022), Benin and Mali (2023), Pakistan (2024) and Senegal (2025).

How effective is it?

GiveWell’s analysis rates Sightsavers’ deworming work at almost double its funding threshold for cost-effectiveness, with several Nigerian states higher still; the 2024-25 project year delivered over 30.5 million deworming treatments protecting more than 23.6 million children. Cataract surgery is one of the most clinically uncontroversial interventions in global health: cataract is the largest single cause of avoidable blindness, and surgery is routine, evidence-backed and highly cost-effective. Sightsavers publishes a unit cost of £170 for a year of inclusive education for a child with a disability.

What are the open questions?

We publish what we are monitoring as well as what we like. The long-run educational and economic effects of deworming remain academically contested: the foundational Kenya study has been re-analysed several times, and GiveWell’s recommendation rests on a careful cost-effectiveness case that survives that debate because treatments are so cheap and side-effects so minimal. On surgical quality, an older review of Sightsavers-supported cataract surgery in Nigeria found roughly 10% of patients with poor visual outcomes at follow-up, a finding the charity itself used to improve quality; we have found no more recent quality concerns. As countries approach trachoma elimination, the cost per case averted naturally rises, which is a programme-economics effect to watch rather than a flaw. Finally, Sightsavers disclosed one serious incident to the Charity Commission in 2024, financial misconduct by a former staff member in its Middle East office; it was resolved, processes were changed, and we read the proactive disclosure itself as a positive governance signal.

Sources

This summary is derived from EveryDrop's internal vetting dossier, prepared under our four-stage assessment framework using public, verifiable sources. Assessments are re-checked every twelve months. If you spot something we should know, email [email protected].