Stop drownings in EU-Educate & save a child's life

Safe Water Sports is a non-profit organization with the interest of providing information and raising awareness to the general public on safety matters related to recreational water activities and water sports with great emphasis on safety standards and the prevention of drownings and sea-based accidents.Its primary scope is the information and sensitization of citizens, mostly children, on all matters relating to both water and sea activities (sports and recreation), emphasizing on safety and accident-prevention issues and the implementation of actions in collaboration with the Private and Public sector. Greece is ranked 11th globally in the list of countries with the longest coastline (13,676 kilometers).

Each year 50,000 European citizens are injured by while doing water sports, whereas in our country, 325 deaths occur each year in the sea. Drowning is considered as the second leading cause of accidental death for children 1-14 years of age.

Since the primary scope of the project is to increase awareness not only in Greece but to other European countries too, by constructing specially designed educational bags in order for the teachers to educate students regarding safety issues in the sea an in water sports, we managed to form an ''Observatory of sea-based accidents'' that take place each year in Greece in order to study the facts in details.

Although, we found out that the majority of sea-based accidents and drownings involve mostly Greeks, we do have statistics about foreign tourists who visit Greece each year. The observatory of accidents that was made in cooperation wiht the Port Authorities and soon will be presented officially to the public, will show the number of drownings based on gender, on month,on region, on beach, on ethnicity, on day time etc. The Observatory of accidents has been also presented to the Government, gaining the respect and hoping to produce meaningful results in 2020. 

Additionally, in 2019 we cooperated with the British Embassy and the French Embassy as an effort to gain information about the sea kind behaviour in UK and in France too. Both Embassies, support our mission, by promoting the Safe Water Sports app to all tourists and tour operators. Indeed, the French Embassy has translated the Safe Water Sports app as well and now it translates all the material needed for the construction of the educational bags that need to be sent to France and French shcools. We do also make an effort to cooperate with other Embassies too, in order to reach our goal and make our educational program meaningful in other countries too.

Furthermore, the educational program has been also approved by the Ministry of Education of Cyprus and many schools there, so far, have started succesfully implementing the program and using the educational bag.

Regarding, the educational program we managed to educate-inform more than 40,000 students in 2019 while in total more than 150,000 children have been informed through our educational program.

On October 2019, we organized the 1st Conference of the Safeguards where 13 schools of each Prefecture that participated in our educational program, were invited to Athens and were nominated in the presence of the Deputy Minister of Education.

We do hope that in 2020, this number will increase on a significat basis since more children will be educated in Cyprus and abroad too.

Finally, our latest project is to enrich the material of the educational program and of the educational bag by creating a very distinguisshed program that addresses to the students of High School,

To conclude, in cooperation with the Ministry of Education in Greece, the educational program will be included soon as an mandatory field at schools during the school year. Therefore, we do believe that when this happens, the educational system regarding safety measures in the sea and in water sports will be a great success story.

Links:

• Safe Water Sports website
• The educational bag of Safe Water Sports