Drowning situation The ground-breaking Bangladesh Health and Injury Survey 2005 (BHIS 2005) identified that drowning was the leading cause of death of children under-18 after infancy (28.6/100,000/year) in Bangladesh. The highest rate of fatal drowning was observed in children 1–4 years (86.3/100,000/year) followed by 5–9-year-old children (26.2/100,000/year).

Identification of Effective Interventions Through various research including PRECISE, SoLiD and Bhasa which were conducted between 2006 to 2019, Centre for Injury Prevention and Research, Bangladesh (CIPRB) identified three effective context specific interventions to prevent childhood drowning in Bangladesh. Those are – (1) Anchal (community daycare) for supervision and provision of early childhood development of children 1–5 years, (2) SwimSafe, a survival swimming teaching to 6–10-year-old children, and (3) First response training to community volunteers.

National level scale-up: Ministry of Women and Children Affairs of Bangladesh launched a mega project worth of USD 32 million to address child drowning and improve early childcare and development (ECCD) considering three mentioned interventions. The project aimed to implement 8,000 community daycares to provide supervision and ECCD services to 200,000 children aged 1–5 years, and teaching survival swimming to 360,000 children aged 6–10 during 2022–2024.

Global scale-up: WHO in its “Global Report on Drowning – preventing a leading killer” (2014) and Preventing Drowning (2022) considered and endorsed these interventions as best practices for child drowning prevention and suggested similar LMICs to adopt the interventions in their drowning prevention strategy. The 75th UN General Assembly of 2021 and the 76th World Health Assembly in 2023 adopted historic resolutions on global drowning prevention. These resolutions were also based on the drowning prevention evidences which were generated in Bangladesh.

Conclusion Drowning is a major public health problem in Bangladesh and now in the priority list of government. CIPRB’s research for identifying evidence-based interventions to tackle child drowning and sharing the findings with global audience helped to influence national and international policies which is helping other countries with similar settings like Bangladesh.