Economic Growth Sudan Project #16834

Help stop drowning in Sudan by training 60 people

by Nile Swimmers

Help stop drowning in Sudan by training 60 people

Project Report | Jul 29, 2015
Building for the future

By Dan Graham | Trustee

Children play-acting the water safety messages

Since the last update, our 36 volunteer trainers in Sudan have been out and busy working to deliver their training programmes. We are ecstatic that they have taught over 3000 people (mainly children) to date.

Our plans for rolling out through the schools have been slightly delayed waiting for a new Minister of Education to be appointed, and getting a meeting with him. We are confident that we will gain permission to access the schools - and in that case our trainers will soon be teaching thousands more children.

We've recently had the finished video through from our Sudanese videographer who kindly volunteered his time. The link below will take you to the YouTube site. It mainly features the Beach Lifeguard training that we ran at the same time as the Aquatic Survival project, but it gives you a really nice flavour of what we do.

In other news, some of our trainers have actually been making life saving rescues, details are sketchy at this point... but it seems that whilst working at a swimming pool, he noticed a child in difficult - and entered the water to save them from drowning. It goes without saying that we are very very proud.

We're busy here working towards our October project, and planning is in full swing for an even bigger programme. We are planning to use the existing experienced trainers to teach new people how to train Aquatic Survival. Hopefully by the end of the programme we will have 100 instructors in Khartoum - to help us hit (in the long term) 4 million children.

Thanks for reading

Children play acting the water safety messages

Links:

Video from our March 2015 project.

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Apr 24, 2015
Saving lives, changing minds.

By Dan Graham | Co-founder, trustee, and project leader.

The final evening of celebration.

It's been a busy couple of weeks since we landed back from Sudan, and the news filtering back makes us prouder every day.

Our original project proposal had to be scaled back somewhat, and in the end we trained 36 new instructors. 17 of them were male, and for the first time ever in Sudan - we had 19 female participants. Honestly, we did not really know what we were letting outselves in for; and how much of a significant step forwards we were taking.

For the first week of the training, the 17 men were taught how to become Beach Lifeguard instructors - involving rescue skills, First Aid, CPR, and importantly - risk assessment and accident prevention knowledge.

In the second week of training, the men were joined by 19 women. Together, the 36 participants were taught how to deliver the basic Aquatic Survival Programme - a series of ten simple messages targetted at children, giving them basic advice about how to behave safely around the water.

This was my fourth trip out to Sudan, and every trip is different, but the same. They are challenging, frustrating, rewarding, and absolutely humbling. The passion, excitement, and motivation demonstrated by this years participants was amazing. In particular, the females - and their drive for more knowledge and learning.

We were very very lucky with the exchange rates, and managed to get a lot more local currency than we had predicted - and so we have been able to employ a programme co-ordinator who manages the activities of the volunteers, and importantly collects the evidence of their activities. We have been able to fund the travel and subsistence expences of the volunteers; and later this year we will be rolling out the Aquatic Survival Programme through the school system.

We are now collecting reports from the participants about their on-going teaching activities. As part of the programme, we taught over 200 Sea Scouts in one day. The total number of children taught is now well over 1000 - and we are planning on hitting about 50,000 (yes fifty thousand, that's not a typo) by September.

Thank you for the support that you have given us. Your money has enabled us to deliver this training to these participants - and as you can see, a small amount of money is taking us a very very long way.

For further information, read the blog - it was updated every couple of days whilst we were out in Khartoum, and you can get a much richer flavour of what we were upto.

Delivering the Aquatic Survival messages.

Practising the rescue of an unconscious casualty

Using low cost items as effective rescue tools

Deep in discussion about risk assesssment.

Links:

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Jan 30, 2015
Not long now until we are off to Sudan! Exciting news about a unique part of our programme!

By Dan Graham | Trustee & Lead Instructor

The timing of this quarterly report is just a touch early to bring you ALL the exciting news.

So - the project that you helped to fund, where are we....

Visas = confirmed.

Flights = chosen, not yet booked.

Locations = selected.

Instructors = selected & briefed (2 British, 3 Sudanese)

Candidates = being identified (by the Sudanese Sea Scouts)

Training programme = being finalised.

Dates = training will be from the 15th to the 26th of March.

And... the BEST news that we have... despite being short on our overall project budget - we are STILL able to run the FIRST EVER female drowning prevention training in Sudan! We are so excited to have a British female instructor coming out with us, and also female Sudanese trainees on the course. We are aiming for a 50/50 split!

We have two programmes running consecutively - we are going to teach some people to become Aquatic Survival Instructors (to teach kids basic swimming skills), and we are going to teach some other people to become Beach Lifeguard Instructors.

Personally, one of the exciting things about this project is the involvement of the three Sudanese instructors. One has been involved since 2007, and the other two since 2011. Our whole model is to work ourselves out of a job, and we hope that one day the Sea Scouts will say to us that they are running a project, and they don't need our help any more. Getting this guys involved to take an active & principal part in the delivery of the two training programmes that we are running is a really important step towards that long-term goal.

We are also in the process of submitting some academic papers to the World Conference on Drowning Prevention that will be happening in Malaysia in November 2015.

Things for later in the year are looking good, with some lovely funders showing some interest.

Thank you for your help and support. We are constantly humbled by it. The next time you hear from us through GlobalGiving - it will be a report on all the things that went on in Sudan!

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