Our vision is a world where no one lives in poverty because of poor eyesight and no one lives with poor eyesight because of poverty. Our mission is to enable people living in poverty to access affordable spectacles and eye care.

VAO’s volunteers help deliver on its vision and mission.

Our volunteer model:

• Supports the Global Standard for Volunteering for Development.
• Is driven by the needs of the country partners we work with to help them build robust eye care services.
• Supports the needs of our charity; VAO receives flexible and varying support from volunteers.
• Has a range of volunteering roles.

Read these documents to find out more

VAO’s Position on Professional Volunteering (Summary version)

This is the best place to learn more, quickly, and includes a helpful statement around outreach.

VAO’s Position on Professional Volunteering (Full version)

This longer paper captures more detail around our latest review process, our research, and the evidence based recommendations that were approved by VAO's Board in 2019.

Global Standard for Volunteering for Development - published by The International Forum for Volunteering in Development (Forum).

VAO has signed a declaration to support the standard and so our future volunteering roles will align to its recommendations for best practice.

Become involved to help the world to see

It is very important to us that you are a Member of VAO. This is a good way to remain involved with the work of VAO and to stay up to date. And it’s a valuable way to ‘help the world to see’ via regular subscription fees, which are used to fund charitable activities in Africa and change thousands of lives.

Our pledge to sharing information about how we work and its impact

We publish the details of all the main restricted grant funds we receive for our country programmes on our website, so everyone can clearly see what activities VAO is under agreement to deliver in the countries in which we work.

Stay up to date

We will be adding new opportunities for volunteering on these pages in the coming weeks.

Have questions?

Look first at our FAQs to see if your questions are answered. 

Need to contact us?

Please email [email protected] in the first instance.

Real Stories

See Real Stories for the changes made to people's lives.

Volunteer Roles

Please see our Volunteer Opportunities page for any current volunteering opportunities.