Help prevent 700 children from drowning in Vietnam

GW/SFL 1^ST QUARTERLY REPORT 2019 (JANUARY TO MARCH) - TO BE READY FOR NEW SWIMMING YEAR

The year 2019 of our team started with the huge workload to be ready for a busy swimming year. Thanks to our friends and donors for your great support and continuous contributions to make a year ahead successful in preventing the drowning rate of children in Quang binh province, Vietnam.

In this quarter (from Jan to March), SFL team mainly spent time to finalize all necessary documentations such as curriculum for learning to swim to fit with the current practice; update and finalize all templates/forms that have been applied during the swimming lessons/seasons to make it more consistent to the current and new project sites. A database system was also strengthened to measure the pass rate of enrolled students required by the SFL program. By that, it is required each student must pass swimming over 25 meters, 2 minutes of treading water, above 8 score of Water safety education written test, Ok with at least a rescue skill. Besides that, a record why students fail, rate of female, male students, grade of student, school of student, gender, number of lessons attended, average class attended, distance of stroke, list of student graduated, repeated students, students dropped out...ect was developed, too.

The aim of all above arrangements is to gradually perfect the program operation and administration for year 2019. This year, it is planned to have more pools within the province of Quang Binh called for support from the Swim for life, in term of chemical and water treatment, kickboards/noodle floats for children to practice at pools, records of the swimming program at pools, partly operational support to the pool supervisors…ect. And the partner pools agreed to cover all the cost related to salary payment to swim teachers/instructors, construction and installation of their pools, schedule of swimming lessons for their children/pools, swim teacher assignment for each course.

In this quarter, all preparations for swim teachers trainings were settled. One training for returned teachers, and two other trainings for around 60 new swim teachers from 15 new pools will be conducted in 3 first weeks of April, 2019. We have worked in collaboration with local partner – Department of Sport of province Quang binh– to send their trainers, with our training team – to deliver 3 above trainings.

Meanwhile, several meetings/discussions with relevant Department of Education to come into agreement to apply the revised swimming curriculum in other project sites were taken place in March.

Quang binh province is located in central region of Vietnam, where the most suitable weather for swimming lessons is from April to September, while the rest of the year is cold and raining. It is forecasted that this is a hot year, therefore an increased number of children enrolled in the swimming lessons will be remarkable.

With the support of our friends, donors that have given your continuous and kind contribution, we believe that, rate of children equipped life skills will be raised up. Number of drowned will be reduced, and there will be no more sad stories of a group or individual children get accident in the water.

Thanks,

SFL Team