Safariseat is a cheap, all-terrain wheelchair designed for people in rural areas in the developing countries.
The project has raised 117,000 dollars to begin production in a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter.
Safariseat is a project by Uji, a social enterprise aiming to help people break out of the poverty cycle.
It has placed its focus particularly on the disabled, and on innovating solutions that will help them live independently.
SafariSeat’s IP is open source, hence it can easily be built in a basic workshop using bicycle parts. Even better, these wheelchairs are designed to work on all terrain.
The plan is to get local workshops to build as many SafariSeats within their localities.
SafariSeats, founded in 2015, was designed by Janna Deeble, who grew up in Kenya.
Janna was moved to design this solution after observing a large number of disabled individuals crawling on their hands with little to no access to healthcare or mobility vehicles such as wheelchairs.
Janna had an accident himself, which rendered him wheel-chair bound for a while, and sparked the Safariseats idea in him.
The SafariSeats team will use the money to set up workshops and build more wheelchairs. It will also set up a disability outreach program to get SafariSeat to people in rural East Africa.
Uji is a UK-based social enterprise founded by Janna, Cara O’Sullivan, James Seers and Bertie Meyer.
Uji is working with Bombolulu Workshops and Cultural Centre, in the coastal town of Mombasa, Kenya.
There they work with 80 disabled men and women artisans to empower them economically and socially to become fully integrated and productive members of the society.
Bombolulu was established in 1969 as a rehabilitation project sponsored by the Association for the Physically Disabled of Kenya.
