Centres and Partners

MEND’s Centres and Partners are located around the world offering health and medical care, mobility aids, corrective surgery, prosthetic fittings, hearing aids, skills training and so much more to patients who are challenged by poverty and lack of resources.

MEND supports our Centres and Partners with expert medical and organisational advice, financial donations, hearing aids, prosthetics, and orthotics.

We liaise between centres, partners, and medical organisations to ensure help is quickly offered to patients. Rob, our director, is a retired engineer so we also advise and design building and development projects.

Hope Centre Fiji

The western side of Fiji and Vanua Levu now has its own prosthetic and orthotic service. The number of people losing limbs in Fiji is epidemic with one amputation about every 9 hours.

Creating a new limb centre in Fiji

Hope Centre Fiji compliments the only other limb centre at Tamavua Rehabilitation Unit in Suva. Hope Centre also offers outreach services to remote communities.

Fijians with disabilities are often excluded from society, sitting in wheelchairs and doomed to a much shorter life. So Hope Centre Fiji empowers amputees to achieve independence, self-reliance, and confidence.

Hope Centre sources imported components from China, recycled parts from various countries, employ trained technicians and also trains local staff.

The team fits modern, lightweight, adjustable limbs at affordable rates with subsidies for amputees from low-income families.

Contact Details

  • Appointments: Phone Ven or Dan +679 977 3888
  • Hope Centre Director: Mr Himmat Lodhia
  • Phone: +679 992 8888
  • E-mail: fijilords@gmail.com

Hope Centre Gulmi, Nepal

This centre is located in Gulmi in west-central Nepal, an area well known for coffee farming and the central market town of Ridi with many temples and festivals.

History

Manager, Ganga Rayamajhi, was three months old when she rolled into an unattended open kitchen fire (sadly not uncommon in Nepal). She lost both legs. At 17 she received her first set of artificial limbs made from remolded plastic drain pipes. Prosthetic technology has come a long way and today her limbs are state of the art.

After meeting Rob, director of MEND, Ganga was inspired to set up her own organisation to help others like her in Nepal – neglected and scorned by society. So MEND helped her train as a community nurse to set up Hope Centre Gulmi.

What they Do

Today Ganga and Hope Centre supports many children and adults with disabilities in Gulmi and remote districts in Nepal. The team offers health camps and community-based programmes to improve their members’ mobility, health, education, and human rights.

Hope Centre also offers legal counselling, skills training, and employment. The Centre’s goal is to support members to live independently with dignity and self-worth in their communities, and to enjoy basic human rights.

Update: Canadian Couple, Gail and Gord have joined MEND to support Hope Centre through their ‘Hastening to Help fund’ from sales of their book on Mt Everest, “Hasten Slowly”. Sadly Gail has passed away but the fund continues to help Hope Centre implement a programme in Gulmi District providing a range of support to disabled people such as accessible toilets and schooling.

Watch the Team in Action

Contact Details


Hope Centre Kashmir, India

This centre is located in the troubled but beautiful district of Jammu and Kashmir, famous for majestic mountains, lakes, and beautifully decorated houseboats. The region has a heavy military presence with international concerns about human rights.

Hope Centre Kashmir works within this tense situation to create healthy, positive changes in the lives of children and adults with disabilities. Although they experience political challenges this centre is one of the busiest reaching a wide sector of the population, including patients in remote mountainous locations.

What They Do

The centre offers access to health care & awareness, mobility aids, corrective surgery, prosthetic fittings and orthotics. Members are offered education, skills’ training, employment and access to human rights. They are also mentored in self-help group business development and micro-loan schemes.

Supporting Local Women

Sewing traditional Kashmiri embroidery
Sewing traditional Kashmiri embroidery

Hope Centre also supports Kashmiri women challenged by poverty. The Centre offers health, education, skills training, HIV education, micro-loans, and human rights training. Many of the women are talented craftswomen and create traditional Kashmiri embroidered bags and shawls for the local and international markets. Contact us if you would like to know more about their crafts.

Contact Details


AGAPE Centre, Andhra Pradesh, India

AGAPE, Achieving Goals of Ability Parity and Education, is an NGO in Andhra Pradesh, South East of India.

Asi Babu at AGAPE
Asi Babu in action

Run by Asi Babu, who experienced disability from a young age. He tragically lost function in both his legs and an arm but today he manages AGAPE tirelessly with just one hand! And he’s also a headmaster at a primary school – what a star!

The Centre’s Activities

  • regularly runs medical clinics
  • organises surgeries
  • arranges artificial limbs and hearing aids
  • offers counselling, education, and welfare programmes

Babu is an innovative leader and recently devised a new form of getting around for himself by adapting an old motorbike into a very cool tricycle. There’s no stopping Babi and his team now! Update: he now has a motorised scooter so it’s even easier for him.

Contact Details


CEED India, Guntur & Adilabad, South East India

CEED, Centre for Education and Economic Development, is an NGO set up by a group of women social workers in the towns of Guntur and Adilabad in Andhra Pradesh, in South East India.

new wheelchair-CEED-MEND
Sireesha receives her new wheelchair at CEED

Their mission is to help people living in poverty, especially women and girls with physical disabilities.

These amazing women passionately promote education for children with disabilities along with skills training for youth and adults.

What they Do

  • CEED provides micro-loans for women with disabilities so they can support themselves and their families.
  • CEED gives education grants to families so their children do not miss out on their education.

CEED’s motto is to help members overcome their problems so they learn that nothing is impossible and they can really go for it!

Contact Details


ALFA: Affordable Limbs For All, Kenya

ALFA is a busy prosthetics workshop in Nairobi. They also offer a hearing programme and a skills training programme. We’ve also had support from our friends and Manager, Trevor, at USA Charity – We Help Two.

Most Kenyan prosthetic workshops were not actively fitting quality, modern limbs that local people could afford to buy. So in August 2018 MEND rented a house in Matasia, outer Nairobi, and set up a simple prosthetics workshop and hostel. A prosthetist and a housekeeper were employed and ALFA has been busy ever since!

Limb parts for the centre are imported from China and socket fabrication materials are sourced locally.

ALFA’s mission statement is to mobilise neglected Kenyan amputees and fit them with low-cost, quality limbs for a better life of mobility and opportunity.

Clients come in on Monday disabled and go home on Friday walking!

Contact Details

  • ALFA Manager: Pascaliah Mogere
  • Phone: +254721146149
  • E-mail: pasckefa@gmail.com (or kmogere@gmail.com)
  • Address: Okello road, off Memusi Road, Near Tuskys Supermarket in Matasia past Ngong, suburb of Nairobi, Kenya

Katalemwa Cheshire Home – Masaka Outreach Centre, Uganda

Katalemwa Cheshire Home (KCH) was founded in 1970 to offer a family home environment and medical care for people who were incurably sick or with physical disabilities. Surviving the hardships of the Idi Amin rule, today the home offers important rehabilitation services. Their motto is ”Rising Above Disability”.

Smiling children at Katalemwa Cheshire Home
KCH and MEND: empowering children

One in ten children in Uganda has a physical or mental disability and most of these live under the poverty line. Children with disabilities experience barriers to education, and healthcare and face stigma, and superstition.

What We Do

When MEND’s Director, Rob, met the team at KCH he discovered that their ideals and goals align closely with MEND’s. So today KCH and MEND manage an outreach centre set up in Masaka where our physiotherapist, Yasin, works around three districts with outreach camps.

Yasin goes to each village to assess young patients for medical care and support. This care can include corrective surgery, hearing aids, mobility aids, prosthetics (making and fitting), physiotherapy, hospital referrals, burns treatments, wheelchairs, and transport costs.

Looking at the bigger family picture the Masaka Outreach Centre also helps the patient’s family with microloans and small business support so they can better support their disabled members.

“Many kids with disabilities spend their days lying down. With locally-made equipment and the skills of the physiotherapist, the kids learn to move and see the world from a standing position!”

Katalemwa Cheshire Home Success Story
Katalemwa Cheshire Home Success Story – Burns Contracture

Our Goals

The Katalemwa Cheshire Home team works hard to provide health care, rehabilitation services, and education for the whole community around the implications of childhood disability.

MEND and KCH aim to empower children and their families to lead happy, fulfilled lives within their communities.

Contact Details


Voice Ghana, Ghana

Ghana is a multi-culturally diverse country located in West Africa. Tribal traditions and local superstitions intensify the discrimination experienced by Ghanians with disabilities.

Voice Ghana was set up as an NGO in 2002 by and for people with disabilities.

The centre empowers, supports and trains members on their rights to healthcare, welfare, education and employment. They also encourage members to form self-help groups. Voice Ghana works nationally on legislation around the rights of people with disabilities.

MEND has teamed up with Voice Ghana to provide hearing aids and prosthetics. We also provide calipers for those disabled by the debilitating effects of polio.

Contact Details


Iyunga Prosthetics Workshop, Tanzania

The hardworking team in Mbeya Tanzania is busy helping lots of people with new limbs and new lives. The US charity ‘We Help Two’ is funding the limbs with parts from Germany and MEND is funding the tools. We Help Two raise money by selling fundraising socks!

Most of the patients at Iyunga have either lost limbs through car or motorbike accidents or gangrene. So the team works with their patients to fit new limbs and teach them how to walk. If the patients are young and still growing they will need new limbs fitted in the near future as they grow.

Contact Details: