A fire ripped through a dormitory at Hillside Endarasha Academy in central Kenya late on Thursday, killing at least 16 children. The blaze is the latest in a grim pattern of school fires that have plagued the country for years. This is the 16th such tragedy in a decade. And it stinks of systemic failure.
Sources on the ground tell me the fire started around 11 PM. Most pupils were asleep. The dormitory was overcrowded, with barred windows blocking escape routes. Police have not yet named a cause, but eyewitnesses report smoke and flames spreading too fast for a simple accident.
Kenya has a history. In 2001, a fire at Kyanguli Secondary School killed 67 boys. In 2017, 9 died at Moi Girls School in Nairobi. Each time, promises of safety reforms. Each time, nothing. The head of the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights, Roseline Odede, told me: “We have seen these reports before. The recommendations gather dust.”
Here’s the kicker. British aid money has flowed into Kenyan education for decades. The UK Department for International Development (DFID) spent over £150 million on school safety programmes in East Africa since 2010. Yet the bodies keep piling up. Documents I have seen show DFID’s own auditors flagged “weak oversight” of fire safety upgrades in 2019. Nothing changed.
This is not just a Kenyan problem. It is a failure of accountability. The British government funds schools through NGOs like Plan International and Save the Children. But who checks the wiring? Who ensures fire drills are real? The money disappears into a black hole of bureaucracy.
Today, 16 children are dead. Their parents wail outside the burned shell of a dormitory that should have had sprinklers, alarms, and unlocked doors. Britain’s Foreign Office says it is “monitoring”. That’s not enough.
We need an independent audit of every UK-funded school in Kenya. We need to name the contractors who built these death traps. We need to hold British officials to account for signing off on safety inspections that were clearly faked.
I have a source inside the Kenyan education ministry who tells me the fire safety certificate for Hillside Endarasha was issued just two months ago. The same source says the inspector who signed it is now “unavailable for comment”.
This is a scandal. And it is not the first. If Britain does not act now, the next fire will kill 17, then 18. The blood is on the hands of bureaucrats in Nairobi and London who ignored the warnings.
I will be tracking this story. I have the documents. I have the witnesses. Watch this space.
