Members of club, based in the country's capital, attended training at the Moi International Stadium and Nyayo Stadium in recent weeks and offered travel to several athletes.

They also provided sandwiches for lunch and are hoping to help the Kenya National Paralympic Committee (KNPC) raise awareness and funding ahead of Rio 2016. 

Among their key aims is to help provide the athletes with better equipment to help them train and compete, such as tyres for wheelchairs and items of clothing which are relevant to their chosen sport.

“It is our job as the rotary club of Nairobi to help them, we raise funds to help them with their training and come to get a little bit of equipment, if we can, so they can better improve themselves,” said David Hastie, Charter President at the Rotary Club of Nairobi Gigiri.

“They suffer from a lack of equipment as they don’t have enough wheelchairs so they can’t all compete at the same time and they are missing things like gloves, which they need to properly manage the wheels.

“We also took pictures of the athletes, particularly the throwers performing, and we are going to play them back to the athletes to show them what they can do better.”

Funding has been a key issue for the KNPC in recent months after their team were forced to miss the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) Athletics World Championships in Doha last October. 

It followed a budget proposal of Ksh 8 million (£53,000/$78,000/€72,000) from the Government, who solely fund the team, withdrawn just prior to the event.

They were also absent from the 2013 event in Lyon for a similar reason.

Missing the 2015 Championships, however, saw them miss an opportunity to qualify athletes for Rio 2016.

The country also sent only 20 athletes to compete in Paralympic events at the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, despite qualifying 32, because 12 were not officially classified by the IPC.

Since then, the KNPC has been suspended by the IPC following months of infighting, temporarily removing Agnes Oluoch as President before she returned to the role in June.

Kenya made its debut in the Paralympics at Heidelberg in 1972, winning a gold medal in the men's 25 metres freestyle 2 by a swimmer known only as Britton.

They have competed at every Summer Paralympics since Arnhem in 1980, winning a total of 38 medals, including 16 gold.

The country's best performance came at Beijing 2008, where they won a total of nine medals, five of them gold.

At London 2012 Kenya finished 40th on the overall medals table with a total of six medals.

Two of them were gold, won by Samwel Kimani and Abraham Tarbei in the men's 1500m in the T11 and T46 categories respectively.