At least 15 students have died in a fire that tore through a girls’ boarding school in central Kenya early on Thursday morning.
The fire erupted at around 1am in a dormitory of the Utumishi Girls School in Nakuru County and quickly spread across the halls, local police said.
Gilgil police said at least 74 students had also been injured in the incident and that the fire had been contained. Firefighters and police officers had fanned out to control the blaze and evacuate other students, according to local reports.
So far, the cause of the fire has not been established.
“It is a distressing and saddening situation,” police official Masoud Mwinyi said, while addressing distraught parents outside the school. Parents, who were woken up by the tragic news, have begun arriving since 5am local time from across the country.
Police said they were informed of the incident at around 4.30am by school principal Joycelene Muraguri. Teams of officers, accompanied by detectives, rushed to the school, located about 7km north of the station, to find the dormitory block already engulfed in flames.
The burnt Meline Waithera Block dormitory was housing 220 pupils, most of them studying in Grade 10, according to reports – making them between 15 and 17 years old.
Kalonzo Musyoka, leader of the opposition Wiper Patriotic Front party, called on the government to take concrete action to protect students at boarding schools and prevent similar tragedies in the future.
Mr Musyoka, who has previously served as the vice president of Kenya, said: “Today, as the political leadership gathers for the National Prayer Breakfast, I call upon them not to let today’s prayers end in that hall. Let them translate into urgent and decisive action.”
He added: “Let us honour these young lives not merely with tears and tributes, but with action that ensures no other family endures this unbearable pain.”
Fires are common in Kenyan boarding schools, with some caused by arson and others by electrical faults. Kenya’s deadliest school fire in recent history occurred in 2001 when 67 students died in a dormitory fire in Machakos County.
In 2024, 21 students were burned to death in a school fire in central Kenya, prompting president William Ruto to declare three days of mourning.
About 10 students died in a school fire in the capital Nairobi in 2021. A student was charged with murder.