The National Sea Rescue Institute (NSRI) has won the International Maritime Rescue Federation (IMRF) Award for the organization’s innovative Survival Swimming Centres.
The importance of teaching children about water safety and the ability to swim should be made a priority at an early age. However, not everyone can afford swimming lessons or have access to safe, clean water to learn to swim in, especially in the underprivileged parts of South Africa.
Drowning Prevention Manager at NSRI, Andrew Ingram said that winning this IMRF Award for their Survival Swimming Centres is an amazing win for the NSRI, “especially being at the Southern Point of Africa to be up against some of the wealthiest rescue services in the world. It’s a real feather in our cap to have won in the category of Innovation and Technology again.
“When it comes to the Survival Swimming Centres (SSC) what we were trying to achieve is to give free swimming lessons to disadvantaged children in safe water. There are two problems with swimming lessons, the first one is that you need to be able to teach children or adults in water that is safe so that they are not going to be harmed by currents, structures in the water, and dirty water. Secondly, you need to make the lessons affordable because most people in South Africa cannot afford to pay for swimming lessons” Andrew states.
The NSRI is generously sponsored by individuals, corporates, governments, and trusts, and so are able to offer free swimming lessons to children who can’t afford them.
The Survival Swimming Centre is housed in a 12-metre shipping container with a 6-metre-long swimming pool and is completely self-sufficient. It includes hi-tech monitoring equipment to ensure safety and high-quality water for the children to swim in.
Ingram adds, “We can afford to do so because of the donations and sponsorships we get which allows us to train survival swimming instructors and water safety educators and then deploy them to areas that can’t afford such privileges in our country.”
“The SSC project would have been completely impossible to do as a money-making concern, but because we have so many generous sponsors within the swimming and construction companies, we are able to do it. Our containers are donated, the circulation filtration systems are donated; the swimming pool is donated and so on,” concludes Ingram.
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Picture: National Sea Rescue Institute / Facebook