* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Every other minute, a child drowns.
The reality of this shocking statistic is wasted lives and preventable deaths on an epidemic scale. Drowning causes the equivalent to two thirds of malnutrition and half of malaria deaths. Yet drowning is a ‘silent epidemic’, unrecognised and under-resourced.
It is time to act.
In every region of the world, drowning is a top cause of child death. As with most epidemics, it affects the poorest and most vulnerable first and worst; over 90% of deaths are in developing countries. Children make up the majority of lives lost. Contrary to popular perception, the risks are not just at sea. Most people drown inland. In bathtubs or buckets; in ponds and rivers, lakes, ditches and pools, as they go about their daily lives, living, working, playing, surviving.
Today, drowning has a similar burden as diseases such as diarrhoea and measles had a generation ago. These days, such diseases are a shadow of their former selves, thanks to concerted international efforts. There is no question that we must do the same for drowning if we are to end this generation’s needless loss of life.
Africa has the highest drowning rates, but in the Asia Pacific region - where the majority of the world’s children live - drowning decimates communities. From Thailand to Bangladesh, from Vietnam to Fiji, drowning is the leading killer of children.
In Bangladesh alone, 43% of all child deaths from one to five years old are from drowning. Here, more children are killed by drowning than by malnutrition, diarrhoea and pneumonia combined. So for a country like Bangladesh there is, truly, zero possibility of ‘getting to zero’ on child mortality by 2030 without addressing drowning.
We can be the generation to end preventable child deaths, we are confident of that. But we reduce our ability to deliver by focusing solely on historic causes of mortality. Despite – indeed, because of - dramatic progress, it’s time for the resource and the debate to shift.
The closer you get to a goal, the more concentrated the challenge and the more intractable the inequity. So, to reach our shared child survival target, we’ll have to look to drivers that don’t feature in the Sustainable Development Goal framework and are silent in sector discussions.
We’ll need to recognise drowning prevention as an enabler of child survival.
And here’s the good news - drowning is preventable. Simple, scaleable solutions could save hundreds of thousands of lives every year. Survival swim lessons, lifeguarding, community crèches and flood response can be delivered at large-scale and low-cost. For example, an $8 swim skills course in Bangladesh resulted in a 90% increase in child survival rate.
If the moral imperative alone isn’t enough to act, perhaps the financial imperative is. Investment on education, immunisation and nutrition is nullified by each life lost to the water. So, drowning prevention has the potential to be a low-cost, high-impact insurance for Sustainable Development Goal progress and hard-won child survival successes since 1990.
It is time to recognise drowning for what it is – a leading, preventable cause of child mortality. And it’s time to resource it accordingly.
If the global community is serious about ‘getting to zero’ on under-five child deaths, it needs to be equally serious about drowning, positioning prevention as a priority - a forgotten, but fundamental Sustainable Development Goal enabler.
We come together today to issue a shared call to action; for a concerted international effort to reduce drowning.
Our immediate contribution will be to work towards the first ever drowning prevention resolution in the United Nation’s 70 year history. A step towards helping to ensure that we give all children the chance to fulfil their futures.
