Teaching children swimming and CPR to save lives in Bangladesh

Drowning accounts for 43% of deaths among children under five. Children learning to swim and receiving CPR training will save lives.

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This article titled “Teaching children swimming and CPR to save lives in Bangladesh” was written by Saad Hammadi in Sirajganj, for theguardian.com on Thursday 28th July 2016 09.23 UTC

At just nine years old, Sadia Yasmin Lata is already a trained cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) caregiver. She’s demonstrating a CPR drill to other children her age. “I would remove any hazardous substance from the ground around him, and then speak into both of his ears to check his senses,” she says. She would then pinch his hand and check his respiration. “If he does not respond, I would breathe air into him and, at intervals, give him a cardiac massage,” she says.

Sadia’s life-saving skills are not just something handy to have, they might prove essential one day. Sadia lives in Sirajganj in northwest Bangladesh, a country where drowning kills more children than any other accident or disease.

Drowning accounts for 43% of deaths among children under five (pdf), according to the Bangladesh Demographic Health Survey 2011.

A 2005 Health and Injury Survey – the latest available – revealed that 17,000 children aged between five and 17 die from drowning every year (pdf) in the country.

Around the world, drowning is most prevalent among children younger than five because this is when their curiosity begins to grow and they start venturing away from supervision, says Aminur Rahman, director of the Centre for Injury Prevention and Research, Bangladesh (CIPRB).

“Our research reveals that the larger the family size the more vulnerable their children are to drowning,” he says. The more children parents have, the more difficult it becomes to look after them, he explains.

The causes of the high number of child drownings in Bangladesh are rooted in poverty. In rural areas, fathers spend most of their days working away from home while mothers engage in household chores. During this time, children mostly hang around with their mothers unless they live in extended families where relatives can take care of them. Most accidents happen when mothers have to split their attention between work and children, Rahman says.

In July 2013, the government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina committed to end preventable child deaths, including drowning of children under five, before 2035. And in response to the high numbers of child drownings, the government made swimming lessons compulsory in primary schools in April 2015.

Over a year later, however, the decision awaits implementation. This is because the education secretary at the time, Nazrul Islam Khan, issued the letter of instruction directly to schools, without following the bureaucratic protocol to monitor its implementation.

With the support of international donors, including Grand Challenges Canada and the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, the CIPRB has introduced SwimSafe across 10 districts of Bangladesh. Though the programme was launched in 2006, it is teaching swimming and rescue techniques to hundreds of children and filling in the gaps where schools are failing.

The organisation identifies suitable ponds in villages, and it installs 12.5m wide bamboo frames in which children have their lessons and can exercise. In Raiganj, the CIPRB operates in 15 ponds with 30 instructors equally divided between genders.

It takes around two weeks for a child to learn the 21 steps of swimming – including getting into the water, floating and treading water – before they graduate, says Arafat Hossain, a supervisor of SwimSafe in Raiganj.

Although scared at first, Sadia was eager to learn how to swim. “I told my mother that I have an instructor who teaches swimming and I want to learn it,” she says. Her mother soon enrolled her into the programme and Sadia learned all the steps and techniques. She says her favourite swimming techniques is an arm pull. “I learned swimming in eight days. I don’t feel scared anymore,” says Sadia.

Shohag Hossain, a swimming instructor at SwimSafe in Raiganj, says he trains around 100 children each swimming season, which lasts from April to December. The CIPRB pays Hossain £1 for every child he trains. He says this makes the trainers enthusiastic about their job, which increases the participation of children.

At present, the programme is only able to provide training to children older than five, as younger children require more supervision. Instead, the CIPRB has opened up a daycare programme called Anchal, which provides a safe place for parents to leave their young children while they go to work.

Although the CIPRB has given training to 500,000 children since its inception, Rahman says there are still 34 million children who should be given the skills, but only the government has the resources to provide training on such a huge scale.

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