Twenty children and one adult were killed on Friday when a school bus overturned in Uganda, in one of the country's deadliest road accidents involving young pupils in recent memory. Three adult males and several other children sustained injuries in the crash.

The victims were pupils and staff from King David Junior School in Kampala, Uganda's capital, returning from an educational trip to Sipi Falls, a scenic waterfall located in the Kapchorwa District in the country's mountainous east. According to a police statement, the driver lost control of the vehicle, which veered off the road, struck a large roadside stone, and overturned. A photograph released by police showed the bus severely mangled by the impact.

Uganda has a consistently poor road safety record. In the previous year, two buses collided on a major highway, killing 46 people, and a 2024 report recorded 4,434 fatal collisions and 5,144 deaths across the country in that year alone. Poor road conditions, vehicle maintenance failures, and driver error are widely cited as contributing factors to the persistently high toll.

Friday's crash is likely to renew calls for tighter regulation of vehicles used to transport schoolchildren, including stricter checks on driver qualifications and vehicle roadworthiness. The deaths of so many young pupils on what should have been a routine school outing underscores the human cost of road safety failures that authorities have long struggled to address. The injured have been taken to hospital, and police say an investigation into the cause of the crash is under way.