Vitamin A supplementation with Helen Keller International

Vitamin A deficiency is a leading cause of preventable childhood blindness, and it does quieter damage as well: a deficient child's immune system copes badly with the infections that children everywhere catch, so ordinary illnesses become dangerous. It remains a public health problem in more than half the world's countries, and falls hardest on young children and pregnant women.

The remedy is a high-dose capsule given roughly twice a year. The difficulty is not the capsule but the delivery: reaching every eligible child in a district, twice a year, every year, usually through mass campaigns coordinated with a national health ministry and carried out by community health workers. Funding pays for that campaign machinery, and for the monitoring that shows what coverage was actually achieved.

Donations made through this page support only the vitamin A supplementation program, which is run by Helen Keller International.

The intervention is decades old, well studied, and inexpensive per child reached. It has no research to fund and no technology to develop, only coverage to extend, which is exactly the profile that makes an additional dollar go a long way. It has been assessed as one of the most cost-effective health programs available to individual donors.

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