About
Emmanuel Balinda works the landing sites of Lake Victoria, the small lakeside settlements where fishing and boat work are the local economy and the water is never far. He founded and leads the African Institute for Water Safety and Drowning Prevention, and he runs the drowning-prevention project at Reach A Hand Uganda, a Ugandan youth organization. His job is to teach the people most likely to die in the lake how not to. That is the whole of it.
The people he reaches are fishermen, boat operators, and the families who live where the work is. Uganda loses around 3,000 people to drowning a year, about eight or nine every day, and the dead are mostly young adults whose livelihoods are on the water. The skills he teaches are deliberately basic: floating for thirty seconds, swimming twenty-five meters. That threshold is what separates a fall into the water that ends in a recovery from one that ends in a funeral.
The training is hands-on and built for places without pools. The Reach A Hand project installs community swimming pools, pilots survival-swimming sessions at high-risk sites, and is writing a Survival Swimming Program Guide with a curriculum, instructor manuals, and evaluation frameworks so the lessons can be taught by others. Balinda also carries the research. He is a co-author on a 2024 study of drowning and water-safety knowledge on Lake Victoria, built on fieldwork across ten landing sites in Mayuge district.
He holds a Master of Public Health from Makerere University, which he completed in February 2026, and he is a competitive swimmer himself. In May 2026 he was accepted into a three-month international leadership program for drowning-prevention specialists. He posts the field work from the water's edge to an Instagram audience in the low thousands. The distance between the size of the problem and the size of his following is the part worth sitting with.
Highlights
- Drowning toll he works against
- about 3,000 deaths a year in Uganda, roughly 8 to 9 a day
- Survival threshold taught
- float for 30 seconds, swim 25 meters
- Study area
- 10 Lake Victoria landing sites across 6 subcounties of Mayuge district
- Training
- Master of Public Health, Makerere University, completed February 2026
- Specialist recognition
- co-author in a BMJ journal; accepted into a 3-month global drowning-prevention leadership program, 2026
Deeper Dive
The unusual thing is the combination. Most public-health professionals study a problem from a desk and leave the doing to others. Balinda co-authored a peer-reviewed assessment of drowning on Lake Victoria, published in a BMJ journal in 2024, and also stands at the landing sites running the swim sessions. The research gives him the numbers, the eight-or-nine-a-day figure and the occupational pattern; the fieldwork gives him the faces. He does both halves of the same job.
The work runs on two structures at once. The African Institute for Water Safety and Drowning Prevention is the body he founded and leads, doing community education and advocacy across Uganda. Reach A Hand Uganda is the established NGO where he manages the drowning-prevention project with real budget behind it: community pools, pilots, and a training guide meant to outlast any single instructor. Building a manual instead of just teaching classes is the move of someone trying to make the skill spread without him in the room.
The geography is specific and it is where the deaths are. The 2024 study covered ten named landing sites across six subcounties of Mayuge district in eastern Uganda. These are not abstract risk zones. They are working fishing communities on the lake where water transport and fishing are essential and largely unprotected. The choice to teach there, rather than in a city pool, is the choice to go where the drownings actually happen.
The footprint is small for the stakes. The Instagram following sits in the low thousands, the recognition is specialist rather than mainstream, and the channels are run by hand from the field. He completed his Master of Public Health in February 2026 and entered an international drowning-prevention leadership cohort in May 2026, both signs of someone building credibility in a field that is still small. What he is attempting, cutting a daily death toll in the communities that carry it, is far larger than the audience currently watching him try.
In Their Words
“These are skills that can mean the difference between life and death.”
“Do one thing to prevent drowning, learn to swim.”
