Since its inception in the mid-1980s, Sight and Life has had its roots in a mission to combat blindness and child mortality caused by vitamin A deficiency. Established initially as a task force during the catastrophic Ethiopian famine (1983-85), the organization set out to distribute high-dose vitamin A capsules to populations devastated by nutritional blindness and infectious disease. It was operating under the umbrella of the Swiss pharmaceutical company F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd as a task force and later with DSM, evolving from emergency relief to strategic nutrition interventions. Over time, what began as a targeted supplementation campaign grew into a broader foundation – recognizing that addressing vitamin A deficiency required systemic change in food systems, local capacity, and sustainable delivery models.

As the years progressed, Sight and Life’s vitamin A work demonstrated how an initially narrow humanitarian intervention could evolve into a global scaled-up public-health success. Several technical resources such as the “Manual on Vitamin A Deficiency Disorders” was published under our name and has been widely used in the field. Sight and Life was deeply engaged in capacity-building: supporting national programs, influencing policy, and creating awareness that vitamin A supplementation was among the most cost-effective interventions in child health. Through partnerships with health ministries, UN agencies, manufacturers and donors, the vitamin A model scaled from emergency relief into routine child-health programs, setting the foundation for Sight and Life’s contemporary model of evidence-based nutrition interventions and broadening into multiple micronutrient strategies.