Background Drowning is one of the leading causes of unintentional death in children in Vietnam. The Vietnam Drowning Prevention project aims to reduce 20% of burden of drowning in Vietnam, this is a comprehensive approach program started in 8 provinces in Vietnam in 2019 and expanded to 22 provinces since 2022 that covered 47% of national burden of child drowning.

Methods Drowning data of children aged 0–15 during 2015–2019 and were collected based on death registration systems and validated by community survey. More than 600 drowning death were analyzed for both intervention and non-intervention areas.

Results During 2015 – 2019 there were 600 children died because of drowning at study area. During 2018 – 2019 there were 200 cases. Child fatal drowning rates during 2015–2017 was nearly 18/100.000 children, during 2018–2019 decreased into 14.8 and 11.2/100.000 children respectively. Drowning rate among boys was twice as high as girls’ rate and it tended to increase in the period of 2016–2019. The rate of children over 6 years old was twice higher than that of children under 6 years old. Drowning rates tends to decrease in intervention areas while keeping stable trend in non-intervention areas.

Conclusions The preliminary results show initial effects of intervention activities on drowning rates but more observation time needed to due to show clear evidence of the effectiveness.