The Lake Victoria Disability Centre has recently bought a piece of land in the rural area, 4km outside Musoma where there is plans to build a new centre.

The existing workshop is in the centre of town and has no room for expansion. The new plot of land is located where the highest percentage of those with disabilities live, enabling more students to attend than are able to at the present site. We plan to keep the existing workshop as a showroom where final year students can exhibit and sell their work.

The new centre will comprise of a larger, better facilitated training workshop to support a larger capacity of students. Our current workshop can hold 40 students and the proposed centre will be able to cater for 150. We hope to construct a multi-purpose building with 3 sections to cater for training for 3 separate trades; woodwork, metalwork and dressmaking/knitting. We have a special interest to develop the metal workshop into an orthopedic workshop so as to be able to produce mobility aids in large quantities such as wheelchairs, tricycles, calipers, hospital facilities like beds and stretchers and at a later stage be able to make prosthetics like artificial limbs. It is also in our vision that a smaller workshop that produces spectacles and hearing aids and general audiometry services be established. Alongside this will be classrooms to teach student’s basic managerial, accounting, engineering skills as well as sign language and braille. We also hope to build boarding facilities so that children who are unable to travel to the school are still able to attend.

We will develop a social playground that can be shared between the disabled children and the other children in the society. This will be made simply and preferably with locally available materials but good enough to contain physiotherapy facilities such as walking frames, swings, climbing frames etc.