Shonaquip’s services include professional assessment, prescription and fitting of clients and training of rehabilitation professionals, government support services and other stakeholders. Uhambo’s Services include advocacy, lobbying, research, partnership development and training of parents and caregivers
Together we provide holistic assessments, customized fittings and follow-ups and strive to ensure that policy and good practice protects the rights of people with mobility disabilities
Shonaquip and Uhambo are Southern Africa’s leading paediatric wheelchair producer and service provider. As an award winning social enterprise we are committed to improving the quality of life of people with postural and mobility disabilities. We are, at heart, a capacity building organization, with a strong human rights ethos, which utilizes tools such as 24 hour, posture support devices to build an inclusive society for children and their families. Through seating services, training, support and advocacy we strive to influence the disability sector in its shift from charity and pity to medical responsibility and social inclusion. Shonaquip was established in 1992 as a for-purpose organisation, by Shona McDonald, who was in-spired the experiences of her daughter, Shelly, who was born with cerebral palsy. This spurred an ex-traordinary lifelong commitment to address the lack of appropriate wheelchair provision, holistic support and capacity building services and adequate policy for people with mobility disabilities. Shona together with our in-house design department continue to innovate and develop the range of mo-bility and postural support devices which are locally produced and hand-assembled at our factory in Cape Town. Our designs are born in the field and informed by a wide variety of users, their unique needs and the contexts they live in. We constantly strive to improve our products and the impact they have on the quality of life of the users through on-going field trials, user feedback and input from our network of local and international seating practitioners. We provide seating clinic services across South Africa and are expanding our reach through building the capacity of local technical and clinical partners in Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe.
