26/08/2025
⚠️ Long read ahead
by Eva Chukwunelo
📌 If you work in policy, healthcare, or industry, ask yourself: what systems are we creating that make mobility a privilege, rather than a right?
If you’ve never had to buy, maintain, or depend on a prosthesis to survive, this might change the way you see disability forever.
This photograph captures a truth I rarely show: there are days when I simply set my prosthesis aside. Days when it feels too heavy, too tight, too painful, days when even survival feels like a performance.
Wearing a prosthesis is often compared to wearing shoes. Some are light, some are heavy, some scar you.
But here’s the difference: when you take off your shoes, you still walk barefoot. When I take off my prosthesis, I lose mobility completely.
That’s the burden many amputees live with, but the world rarely sees.
My current prosthesis cost close to 2 million naira (around $1,300 USD), and that’s considered “cheap,” because I use a basic model. Maintenance is another story: liners, sockets, adjustments. I’ve had to fight for jobs not just to live, but to be able to keep walking. Imagine that, working not for luxury, but to afford the ability to move.
And even then, no prosthesis can replace a real limb. I remember one day my socket was so tight that I became dizzy in public, struggling to steady myself while strangers looked on. On another day, someone pointed at my prosthesis and said, “That leg must be very expensive.” They weren’t wrong, but it struck me how people saw the cost of the device, not the cost of living with it.
Globally, this is not just my story. According to the World Health Organization, only 1 in 10 people worldwide who need assistive products like prostheses have access to them. That means millions of people wake up every day without the basic tools to walk, work, or live independently.
Whenever the issue of prosthetic insurance is raised with leaders in Nigeria, the response is often the same: “Prosthetics are expensive. We cannot cover it.”
But what they don’t calculate is the true cost of exclusion.
Every amputee without access loses not only mobility but the chance to work, study, participate, or feel safe in society. The cost is not measured in naira or dollars, but in lost potential.
So what must change?
• Policymakers need to see prosthetic access as a right, not a luxury.
• Healthcare professionals must support not just the fitting of devices, but the emotional journey of limb loss.
• The creative industries must normalize disabled bodies, not as objects of pity, but as part of everyday culture.
A prosthesis is not a symbol of inspiration. It is survival equipment.
And survival should never be this expensive.
