The six coaches of Bangladesh Swimming Federation have not been paid their salaries from last year’s SwimSafe program where they taught 700 homeless and underprivileged children under Centre for Injury Prevention and Research, Bangladesh (CIPRB). The situation is likely to reach a conclusion at an executive meeting today.
The relationship between the coaches and federation has been getting worse since few members of the new committee decided to make a change in a continuous process of referees’ payment. If the new system gets approved, the referees will earn less money than before and most of them are likely to not teach homeless children swimming again.
Under the banner of SwimSafe, CIPRB in collaboration with Bangladesh Swimming Federation has been teaching poor street children at both the swimming complexes in Dhaka since 2005. The coaches used to get 50% of the money provided by CIPRB, a non-government organization and the rest went to the federation. Now, the new committee proposed to pay the referees on a monthly basis, which is around Tk8,000-10,000 a month.
The SwimSafe program is one of very few earning sources for the swimming coaches of Bangladesh and it was learnt that if the new payment system is implemented, most of them could leave the job.
Today, the 4th executive committee meeting will take place at the national swimming complex where one of the issues is coaches’ salary process for SwimSafe.
“Earlier, the coaches used to get the half the money CIPRB provided for the teaching program. It was a continuous process since 2005. Tomorrow (Saturday) in the executive committee meeting we will discuss about it whether the coaches will get their money like previous system or in a monthly basis,” said Bangladesh Swimming Federation joint-secretary Amirul Islam yesterday.
In the last year, CIPRB and federation taught swimming to 700 children, 300 less than they expected. CIPRB provided Tk10,00 to federation for every child.
