1. Providing low-cost mobility equipment and other physio aids that are designed to suit special needs and local conditions.
2. Setting up self-help workshops in developing countries to transfer skills, training and technology.
3. Seeking sponsors and funding for equipment for those that can not afford it.
4. Liaising them with medical and rehabilitation services.
5. Promoting their needs and problems and finding solutions through our resource network.

Background

Most disabled people in developing countries must struggle each day for their basic needs: food, clothing, housing and employment.

Common causes of disability are polio, muscular dystrophy, cerebral palsy, diabetes, spina bifida, accidents, war injuries and infections left untreated.

Wheelchairs, walkers and other rehabilitation equipment are often unsuitable, ill-fitting, unavailable and prohibitively expensive. Vast numbers of disabled people must remain at home, crawl on hands and knees and remain locked away from society as bearers of shame, embarrassment or bad luck for their families.

While an able-bodied person earns about NZ$1-NZ$5 per day in most developing countries, a wheelchair can cost between NZ$100 and NZ$500. Inability to work and extreme poverty forces most disabled people to rely on charity for buying mobility aids.

Millions of people with disabilities in Africa, Asia, Central and South America as well as in the Pacific Islands urgently need mobility aids and better health care. Lack of social welfare assistance, combined with apathy or corruption of their governments, hinders improvement to their plight -- a task which falls on church groups, aid agencies and non-governmental organisations, such as MEND.