National Sea Rescue Institute of South Africa

The National Sea Rescue Institute (NSRI) is the charity that saves lives on South African waters.

Established in 1967, the NSRI is a registered non-profit organisation that is committed to drowning prevention and focusses on saving lives, changing lives, and creating futures for those threatened by immersion or submersion in water in South Africa.

 What we do:

Our Rescue Services are run by highly skilled, unpaid volunteers who are on call day and night, throughout the year, from rescue bases along the coast and at inland dams.

Our active drowning prevention initiatives include preventive measures such as

Pink Rescue Buoys for emergency flotation, emergency signage, Lifeguards, active patrols during peak seasons, an Emergency Operations Centre that is manned 24-hours a day, as well as an active beach camera project that monitors selected beaches for swimmers in distress.

Our Water Safety Education programme is presented at under-resourced schools around the country at no charge.  Children are taught about the dangers of water, what to do if someone gets into trouble, how to help a friend in need, how to perform bystander CPR, and who to call for help. To date we have reached over 3,5 million children through this programme.

Our Survival Swimming programme focuses on teaching children four skills that will save their lives should they suddenly find themselves out of their depth in water. We teach them to control their breathing, orientate themselves in the water, float and move at least five metres through the water to safety. This programme is being run in under-resourced areas where we have access to swimming pools to use for the training.

A significant challenge has been to find a safe body of water in which to teach our Survival Swimming lessons in rural and under-resourced communities. To overcome this hurdle, we developed innovative mobile Survival Swimming Centres. These centres are constructed in 12m shipping containers and can be transported to wherever they are needed. To date, three of the centres have been rolled out and hundreds of children have received the lifesaving skills of Survival Swimming.

The NSRI is entirely funded through donations and sponsorships.

You can help us save lives by clicking the DONATE button in the top-right corner of this page or by creating your own campaign to raise funds for the NSRI.