by Matilda Branson
Every year, 175,000 children throughout the world die from drowning. This makes drowning the second of the top five causes of injury death in children worldwide, second only to road crashes. But where does this fit in with, say, gender or development? Bear with me, dear friends.
Coming from Australia, learning to swim and surf were an inherent part of growing up. Most children are dragged through insurmountable survival swim classes from the age of four onwards. They learn to tread water, swim kilometres in pools fully clothed imagining: “If I fell off a boat, what would I do?” scenarios, chucking ropes and any flotation devices (read: plastic milk bottles, buckets, kickboards, anything at hand) at each other, handling currents and learning to conserve energy, not to panic and how to save both yourself and others in risky water situations.
Even growing up in a rural farming area in inland Australia far from the sea, we learned the four survival strokes and complex dives – which to use when there is an oil spill in the ocean and which to use when there may be sharp rocks beneath you leaping from a fast-moving speedboat. If James Bond can do it, apparently kids from rural Australia whose closest water source is a cattle trough should be able to as well. Just in case.
As a girl, learning to swim taught me many other things: I learned that baring my body in bathers in front of boys I liked didn’t result in my melting into a puddle like the Wizard of Oz’s Wicked Witch of the West, and it also showed me we all kind of look similar under all the various fashions we wore. The sheer usefulness of tampons instead of sanitary pads was most obvious when I had to swim on my period. I could hold my breath for longer than anyone – even longer than the jock boys – which equalled immediate schoolyard respect. The positive unintended lessons learned from swimming lessons just go on and on.
In Nepal last week I competed in a triathlon through the Himalayas, where I needed to swim 1.5km across a mountain lake, Lake Begnas. A few days later, in this same lake, three people died and another three people are missing after a fishing boat capsized. I swam across that lake using a curious combination of survival backstroke, breaststroke and sidestroke. I could swim across Lake Begnas because I was a lucky Australian kid from a water-crazy island whose parents took me to swim lessons for many years. Those three people died because they didn’t know how to swim, because there was never the opportunity to learn.
I’ve recently been mulling over the potential benefits of swimming lessons and education for young boys and girls in the context of international development. More and more I believe that learning to swim – especially if you live in an environment surrounded by or in constant contact with rivers, lakes or oceans – is a fundamental human right. It fits snugly under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ principles, such as the right to live in safety or the right to opportunities to develop one’s skills. Read more
by Ayesha Asghar. Ayesha is a Pakistani Canadian who writes and advocates on gender violence and racism.
by Jarrah Hodge
Amanda Marcotte’s Slate overview piece 
Farah Ghuznavi draws on her experiences as a development professional for inspiration in her writing, and remains an unrepentant idealist. She has worked for NGOs in Bangladesh, Britain and Africa, as well as with the United Nations, and the Grameen Bank, famous for its collateral-free loans to poor women. Her work has been featured in magazines and anthologies in the UK, US, Singapore and Bangladesh. She is the editor of Lifelines: New Writing from Bangladesh, which is 
