In December 1984 the late Graham Layton and Zaka Rahmatulla, who were retiring from their very successful business careers, decided to establish the Layton Rahmatulla Benevolent Trust with Rs 1 million ($ 66,000).

This was used to build and run a mobile eye hospital in Tando Bago a small town 250 kilometres east of Karachi. They envisioned an organization which would grow to provide free eye treatment to the poor & underprivileged citizens across the length & breadth of Pakistan so that no Pakistani would go blind just because he/she could not afford the treatment.

They also left behind 4 founding principles which we call The Spirit of LRBT which guide our activities and permeates everything that we do:
• All treatment at LRBT should be totally free so that no man, woman or child should become blind
just because he or she cannot afford the treatment.
• Treatment should be appropriate state of the art. Charity does not mean second-rate treatment.
• There should be no discrimination due to gender, caste, ethnicity, language, religion or sect.
• Patients to be treated with compassion and dignity.

23 years later the vision of Graham Layton & Zaka Rahmatulla is a reality and their legacy is a nationwide network of 15 purpose built hospitals with state of the art equipment and 36 primary eye-care centres/outreach clinics in all the 4 provinces.