BU Research Blog

In the first week of September colleagues working on our SONAMONI project presented preliminary results at the Safety Conference 2026 in Cape Town, the Republic of South Africa.   In total, six abstracts from the Sonamoni Project had been accepted.  The first paper presented by BU PhD student Md. Shafkat Hossain was highlighted in a previous BU Research Blog (see here!).

Our Bangladesh-based collaborators, CIPRB (Centre for Injury Prevention and Research, Bangladesh) presented papers with the following sunmmaries:

• Understanding mothers’ caregiving routines is essential to develop appropriate interventions; however, traditional local practice restricts opportunities for women to participate in the HCD process. Therefore, a study was conducted to explore ways to overcome these restrictions to ensure gender representation during the development and implementation of drowning prevention interventions in rural Bangladesh.
• The objective of the second abstract was to explore community perceptions and their prioritization of the proposed drowning prevention solutions.
• The objective of the third abstract was to explore the use of different visual tools that assisted the researchers, designers, and the community to develop more acceptable and sustainable drowning prevention interventions in rural Bangladesh.
• The objective of the fourth study was to identify the association between household income, caregiving investment, child supervision, childcare-related expenses, and exposure to drowning risk among children under 2 years in Bangladesh.

The presenters’ names were: Notan Chandra Dutta, Research Manager; Shibat Mirza Rowshan, HCD Specialist; Mahbub Hasan, Research Officer (Health Economics).

Furthermore, our collaborator Dr. Becky Sindall, Senior International Advocacy Manager at the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) in Poole contributed to a session on ‘Drowning Prevention and Water Safety Policy’.

SONAMONI is jointly coordinated by Bournemouth University (BU) and CIPRB), working with the University of the West of England, Bristol, the University of Southampton, Design Without Borders (DWB) in Uganda, and the RNLI. We are working to reduce drownings among newly-mobile children, generally those under two years old. This £1.6m project has been made possible thanks to a grant from the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) through their Research and Innovation for Global Health Transformation programme.

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

Faculty of Health, Environment & Medical Science