DHAKA: Bangladesh has made swimming lessons mandatory in schools to try to save the thousands of children who drown every year, a government official said Thursday. Around 18,000 children between the age of five and 17 drown in low-lying Bangladesh every year because they do not know how to swim, according to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF).
"It's a huge figure, which is 20 times higher than Australia," education secretary Nazrul Islam Khan told AFP. He said schools had been ordered to use local ponds or swimming pools to teach their pupils to swim.
Drowning has been described as a hidden epidemic in Bangladesh, a delta nation that floods frequently.–AFP
Ponds are the main bathing place for more than two-thirds of the country's 160 million people. Khan said 48 people drowned every day in Bangladesh, where one in four deaths of children under four is due to drowning. UNICEF has already introduced a project to provide swimming lessons in Bangladesh.