The Sign Project - Time to make safety not a choice

Overview

Have you ever seen someone drowning? Have you ever lost someone and you didn’t know what really happened to him? Did you know that Hundreds of thousands of people die every year from drowning?

In 2012, an estimated 372 000 people died from drowning, making it a major public health problem worldwide. In 2016, 5022 refugee drowned in the mediterranean sea out of a total of 7495 refugees worldwide of which 71% are still missing. Based on study for World Health Organization (WHO), Drowning is the 3rd leading cause of unintentional injury death globally.

There are many NGOs in Turkey that distributes life jackets to refugees since they know refugees will seek the cheaper life jackets to buy, which usually ends by buying fake life jacket filled with non-buoyant materials.

The Challenge:

This project aims to secure the refugees' journey as they try to cross the sea to reach freedom to a level were hopefully, death level will be reduced by filling the current gaps of life jackets with a new and improved design of a life jacket that protects the drowning person from the water temperature and marine animals attacks; it also emits a distress signal to insure the saving of the endangered person.

"The Sign Project" was chosen as the project’s name for two main reasons, first because the project aims at showing that the lives of the thousands of victims we lose every year matters and that we hope that our work can serve as a warning sign that these lives are in jeopardy; second because the  the core purpose of our project is to prevent incidents arising from maritime travelling. Therefore, our aim is to embrace this issue as a sign for us to take action.

It is an opportunity to give the person who is drowning the time needed to be saved.

“ Problems are not stop signs, they are guidelines.” - Robert H. Schuller