Background Drowning causes a higher number of child deaths in Bangladesh due to a lack of supervision. The absence of ECD provision exposes rural children to a high degree of adverse experiences during the critical period in childhood. The Anchal, a drowning prevention intervention under the project Bhasa aims to prevent child drowning and enhance ECD outcomes for children 1–5 years in Bangladesh. Though the intervention has proven effective for child drowning prevention, the effect of ECD intervention remains unidentified.

Aims The objective of the study was to explore the effect of the integrated child drowning prevention intervention on children’s Early Childhood Development (ECD) and learning.

Methods The study applied Random Control Trial (RCT) where the participants aged 3.5 to 5 years. Total 51 intervention and 53 control children participated at the baseline whilst 57 intervention and 55 control group children were assessed at the end-line. The average percentage scores of the domains were calculated by accumulating all the subtasks scores.

Results Anchal children’s overall ECD improvement was significantly higher (23%) than the children in the control group (6%). Anchal children outweighed the control children in all the four individual development domains. Anchal children’s progress was the highest for the early literacy domain (28%), whereas the control group gain was equally higher for the socio-emotional (7%) and early numeracy (7%). Both groups obtained the lowest scores in the motor domain.

Conclusion Integration of the ECD intervention into the child drowning prevention intervention helped significantly enhance children’s overall ECD development at a greater level.

Learning outcomes The integrated Anchal intervention could be an effective solution and replicated in low resourced settings to improve child mortality and ECD outcomes.