The neighbour, Nesad Causevic, happened to be a wheelchair engineering specialist. Between them they worked out the shape of the thing: chairs that British users no longer needed could be collected, refitted and sent south. In Ghana, Alhaji Meffle, then the Central regional manager of the National Information Technology Agency, agreed to chair the effort, and has done so ever since.
The first consignment was 13 wheelchairs and 100 spare wheels. The spares mattered as much as the chairs. Second-hand equipment arrives from the UK by sea freight needing refitting — seat width, cushion, footplate height all have to be matched to the person who will sit in it — and on unpaved ground, tyres and inner tubes wear through fast. A chair without spares has a short life.
The most telling items in the 2026 distribution were not medical at all. Cape Coast is a town of boarding schools — Mfantsipim, Adisadel, Wesley Girls', Holy Child — and every admitted student reports with a prospectus list: a mattress, a bucket, blankets, and a chopbox, the lockable trunk in which dormitory food is kept. Since 2017 the state has covered tuition and boarding. It does not cover the trunk. Families who cannot assemble the list send their children late, or not at all.
So the foundation sent mattresses and chopboxes, meant for children with disabilities entering senior high school, to make the months away from home less hard.
Maame Samma Peprah, chief executive of the Office of the Registrar of Companies, has joined her father in keeping the work going. She put the purpose plainly.
This is about dignity, independence and ensuring that persons living with disabilities have the opportunity to participate fully in society.
Sixteen years on, the arithmetic has not changed much: a few chairs at a time, a crate of tyres, a stack of trunks. It began because someone at a park asked, and someone else did not treat the asking as a formality.