Background In Vietnam, drowning claims nearly 2,000 children’s lives annually. Aimed at reducing child drowning deaths, the Prime Minister released a 10-Year National Program on Child Injury Prevention in 2021, which included objectives for child drowning prevention. This important decision created a legal base for socio-political organizations and local nonprofit organizations to become actively involved in child drowning prevention, especially at the provincial level.

Objective The program aims to promote community-based initiatives and translate the effective and proven intervention of survival swimming to local ownership, thus reducing child drowning deaths.

Program Description: Since 2018, Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Global Health Advocacy Incubator (GHAI) supported the Government of Vietnam to test and scale child drowning prevention program in 12 provinces. To increase the involvement of non-governmental organizations, GHAI promoted partnerships among local non-profit organizations (Swim for Life and Hue Help), socio-political organizations (Women’s Union) and local authorities in new provinces with high burden districts since 2022. These provinces are affected annually by natural disasters. The program has focused on capacity building for local teachers, and survival swimming and water safety education for children.

Outcomes and Learnings 112 physical education teachers were trained in survival swimming and certified by the Department of Culture and Sports as official instructors for the provinces. The program also trained 2,548 school-aged children in survival swimming with a program pass rate of 70.4% (in order to pass, students must swim at least 25 meters and stay afloat for 90 seconds). and equipped 8,075 children with water safety skills. The cost per child to complete the program was 20 US$, lower than the cost per child in the original program provinces (30 US$). The local ownership of the program resulted in in-kind contributions from local authorities, including infrastructure and supplementary training for children who did not pass on their first attempt.

Implications Community engagement and local ownership of the program has led the Provincial People’s Committees to consider developing local resolutions and long-term plans to continue implementing the child drowning program.

Conclusions Partnerships between local government and non-governmental organizations are foundational to a successful and sustainable program.