Mobility Care is a wheelchair workshop, located in Arusha, Tanzania. It started in 2003 when Daniel Namkessa and Agnes () finished a one year program at Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Center (KCMC), where they learned how to build wheelchairs. They began getting help in 2002 from Motivation, an international disability charity. Motivation gave them their jumpstart, and by 2005 Daniel needed more workspace to grow his company. A local children’s mental disability program had some spare land that they donated to Daniel and Agnes. After receiving the land, Daniel found other donors to help build their shop and buy them the tools they needed to make wheelchairs. Since then, they have been building about 10 chairs per month for people mainly in the Arusha area. However, Daniel says that he is more than happy to take orders from outside of Arusha, as he has shipped many wheelchairs successfully to different parts of the country.
The wheelchairs are built using local material. They buy the rubber caster wheels, and outsource the chair seat and chair back to a local tailor. They are able to buy the frames to the wheels, from common bicycle shops in Arusha.
The wheelchairs are paid for as much as possible by the customer, though many times Daniel must go out and look for donors to contribute the rest of the payment, and sometimes the entire payment. Daniel tells me he is always able to find people who are willing to help pay for a wheelchair, which cost around $250.
Daniel is very open minded and welcomes growth in the company. From the chair he built many years ago which our team worked on in class, I have noticed several changes to that chair to make it more user friendly. He is also currently working on an additional final jig, which is a device they set up all the parts they’ve made so that everything fits the same each time, and they do not have to line parts up by eye. He has told me the final welding of the chairs is the part of the process that they get bottlenecked in, and with an additional jig, he hopes to be able to increase their production rate to 20 chairs per month. Because of these things, I am hopeful he will incorporate my teams design into his line, for those customers who will require public transportation often.
