Help Children in Bangladesh from Drowning

Problem #1 – Water bodies are accessible to children.
Bangladesh is a “country crisscrossed with rivers and canals…” (Al-Mahmood). This allows for any child to unknowingly or accidentally end up in a position where they become submerged in water. A potential solution would be “installing bamboo-made fences around the ponds [which would] significantly reduce deaths [from] drowning” (Drowning).

Problem #2 – Children do not know how to swim.
Falling into water is not the root problem. It’s not knowing how to get out that leads to death. There is no solution in this segment to toddlers drowning because it is impossible to teach them how to swim. However, children above the age of four can and should learn how to swim. There was a case in Bangladesh where a six-year-old girl was found dead in her backyard pond (Al- Mahmood). The article then goes on to say, “she did not know how to swim” (Al-Mahmood).

Problem #3 – Children are unsupervised.
Parents will often times leave their children alone, even if just for a brief moment. In Bangladesh, that’s no different. The girl drowned in the last paragraph because “at midday there had been nobody in the house to hear the child’s frantic splashing after she fell into the pond” (Al-Mahmood). Synergos, a drowning prevention partnership, claims that most children drowning events in Bangladesh occur “during the hours when adults are working and children go unsupervised” (The Bangladesh). Synergos also claims that daycare would be an effective way of combating child drowning events.

Problem #4 – Inability of adults to call for help.
Bengali people often believe in traditional remedies for people who are pulled out of water and unconscious (McVeigh). These remedies include acts like pulling a child from the water and flipping them onto their stomach in the hope that “the pressure will make them vomit out the water” (McVeigh). “Another ancient remedy involves putting ash or salt in a child’s mouth, in the perception that it, too, will cause vomiting” (McVeigh). Unfortunately, when there is no effective contact method for paramedics, these are the practices that average Bengalis resort to. Engineering an SOS button that is linked to all local hospitals and authorities and that is in every household would be a step in the right direction of proper treatment for victims of drowning.

Problem #5 – Slippery terrain
With wet mud as the terrain for most areas in Bangladesh, slipping is inevitable. The worst case scenario is that a child slips and fall into deep water. That exact situation happened when a girl “had slipped while plucking fruit from a jujube (red date) tree that grew close to the water” (Al- Mahmood). She was found face down in the water later that day (Al-Mahmood). Engineering a high friction work boot for kids that sacrifices comfort for cost-effectiveness is a possible solution to this problem.