Latest News
Thursday 15 June 2017
From: Christina Fonfe
Received by: Email.
Fantastic News: Speedo International Launch their Global Drowning Prevention Project, Swim Generation, with our Sri Lanka Women’s Swimming Project on their Front Page
Speedo International has been a long-term supporter of our Project through the generous donation, post-Indian Ocean 2004 Tsunami, of suitably appropriate swimwear. The loan of smart but otherwise quite unaffordable swimsuits to poor rural and coastal women, which then become permanent gifts once they have learned to swim, has been a great recruiting motivator contributing to the Project’s success and continues to this day. A great Thank You to Speedo from hundreds of grateful women. Speedo has always shunned publicity for their generosity and so, it has been a great honour, after our long association, to suddenly find ourselves in the limelight of their Social Purpose Programme to promote Drowning Prevention around the Globe. The Speedo Programme, called Swim Generation, essentially uses Speedo’s international market lead in aquatic sportswear to urge their suppliers and business associates to look inwards towards their own countries and communities and decide how they too can best address the issue of drowning taking place within their own local communities. We and a few other small charities, such as CIPRB in Bangladesh, Nile Swimmers in South Sudan, SWIM (Cambodia), RLSS and others, are being held up as examples of what can be done in different ways in different countries to achieve the same outcome, namely by teaching swimming to save lives and prevent death by drowning. Rather than repeat what has been said, I urge you to read Speedo’s outstanding intentions, verbatim, at source: In the case of both Bangladesh and the South Sudan, we are especially pleased at having been the catalyst for those projects to introduce swimming lessons for women and girls in their countries. This was a direct result of our presenting papers to each other at World Conferences on Drowning Prevention in Vietnam, Germany and Malaysia. As someone once said: Imitation is the fairest form of flattery. We are delighted for the women who now swim in those countries. Thank You Speedo for the great flip upwards in our endeavors to eliminate drowning as the under-reported, silent, killer that it is, all over the world. |
