A fire swept through a dormitory at a girls’ school in Kenya’s Rift Valley overnight, killing 16 students and injuring dozens more, Kenyan authorities said on Thursday.
The blaze broke out shortly after midnight at Utumishi Girls’ Academy Senior School in the town of Gilgil, located in west-central Kenya, and burned for more than two hours, according to Education Minister Julius Migos.
Migos said 79 students were injured in the incident, although 71 of them had already been discharged from hospital by Thursday morning.
Television footage broadcast by Kenyan media showed smoke-stained walls and shattered windows at the school, while distressed family members gathered outside the campus seeking information about missing students.
Authorities said investigations into the cause of the fire are ongoing.
“The identification of the cause of the fire is not yet established,” Migos told reporters.
School fires remain a recurring problem in Kenya, where authorities recorded more than 100 such incidents in 2024 alone. Researchers have previously linked many of the fires to student protests over strict discipline measures and poor living conditions in boarding schools.
A parent whose daughter survived the fire described scenes of panic as flames rapidly spread through the dormitory building.
“The fire started from an upper dome and spread all over within that time,” Eunice Mureithi told Kenya’s NTV television station. She said part of the structure had become blocked, trapping some students inside, while others managed to escape.
The tragedy follows another deadly school fire in nearby Nyeri County in 2024 that killed 21 students at a primary boarding school. Authorities never conclusively established the cause of that incident.
Kenya’s deadliest school fire in recent decades occurred in 2001, when 67 boys were killed at Kyanguli Secondary School near Nairobi in a blaze that investigators attributed to arson.
