Bombolulu Workshops and Cultural Centre

Bombolulu Workshops and Cultural Centre is a program of the Association for the Physically Disabled of Kenya (APDK). The organization produces crafts that include jewelry, textile, wood and leather products. Most of the crafts are handmade and created by disabled people. 

The workshop includes four areas: jewelry area, textile area, leather product area, and wheelchair area. In the jewelry area, I observed people created some parts of jewelry and cut and knitted with recycled materials (those are cans of soda), and at the textile area, people printed clothes by using silk screen painting. In the wheelchair area, I saw a lot of order-made wheelchairs that adapt the users' body.

The person who introduces the Bombolulu Workshops said that “we think that people who work here is not disabled, they have strong points”. According to him, the workshop started in 1967 in Mazeru, 22 km far from the current place, by a British guy. The workshop transferred to the current place in 1986 and APDK took over the project.

The workshop started jewelry craft with only 20 people. Currently, the organization expands about 160 people including 90 permanent workers, 60 part time worker, and 16 admin people. The organization also incorporates a nursery school that holds 180 kids. The other feature of the workshop is that the workers in the organization live very near to the workplace. 

Surprisingly, Japan is one of the biggest business markets for them. The guide said that Europe, the US, and Japan are the biggest sales partner. The Japanese organization that partner with the workshop is Global Village that is the mother organization of People Tree.

Although this organization does a social good, there were some problems. I heard about the issue that they differentiated the salary between disabled craft maker and not disabled marketer or designer. The capital system utilizes socially vulnerable.