Bangladesh is part of the Ganges Delta, with tens of millions of families living close to water. Research shows every day, 30 children under the age of five die from drowning. Preventing this tragedy in a country of 160 million is not easy.

Solving big problems requires more than quick fixes. It requires supporting leaders closest to the issues, getting to root causes, identifying sustainable solutions, and creating extraordinary collaborations to achieve scale. The root cause of child drowning in Bangladesh is a childcare coverage gap. Parents struggle to provide supervision amid their many other responsibilities during the day.

The burden of care weighs heavily on women in Bangladesh, who work an average of 16 hours a day.

With so much water close to the places where children play, the results are too often tragic.

Daycare is a proven tool for preventing child drowning.

Research by Johns Hopkins University, CIPRB and ICDDRB found that community daycares reduced child drowning deaths by more than 88% in implemented communities.

Synergos began work in Bangladesh in 2018, in support of Bloomberg Philanthropies' goal for sustainability solutions to scale daycares as a proven intervention for child drowning. That led us to create the Drowning Prevention Partnership. It brought together diverse stakeholders from child protection and ECD sectors including government, civil society, national and international organizations, community groups, and businesses.

We collaborated closely with the Bangladeshi government and aligned with their priorities to secure their broad-based support and ownership for a government-led initiative to scale integrated childcare centres for drowning prevention across the country. By using bridging leadership tools - inner work, systems thinking, collective learning and more - we have helped mainstream change as an investment in the future of our country. Previously, almost all the childcare intervention models had been donor-driven, with a narrow focus and no planning for sustainability. We designed an integrated model focused on shared vision for children beyond sector silos.

This broader conceptual frame requires multiple actors and agencies to coordinate and collaborate for service delivery.

Having the government in the driving seat and strong community and local engagement would address many of the sustainability challenges.

As of late 2021 the greatest success is that the integrated childcare project for drowning prevention, which we collectively designed and submitted to government is about to achieve scale.

The Bangladesh government has agreed to scale a $32 million project over three years with 80% funding commitment.