Uganda has, in recent months, been confronted with two tragedies that, on the surface, appear unrelated but which speak to the same underlying failure: a system that has not yet treated the safety of young children as a non-negotiable foundation of education.
The first was on April 30th, at an Early Childhood Development center in Ggaba, Kampala, where a man posing as a parent gained entry to a nursery school and fatally stabbed four toddlers, the youngest just fifteen months old. He locked the gate behind him and carried out the attack in under seven minutes. The perpetrator, Christopher Okello Onyum, was later convicted on all counts and sentenced to death by the High Court in Kampala, in a case that stunned the nation.
The second was of an entirely different character, but no less devastating. During their return journey, a school bus returning from an educational trip to Sipi Falls overturned, killing twenty pupils and an adult. The crash prompted the government to ban all school excursions nationwide, as the tragedy triggered public grief and widespread demands for better safety standards. Preliminary investigations pointed to a mechanical fault before the driver lost control on a stretch of road known locally for serious crashes.
One tragedy was born of mechanical failure and poor road infrastructure. The other was a premeditated act of violence. Yet both beg the same question: have the institutions responsible for young children—schools, nurseries, and the systems that govern them—taking safeguarding as a priority?
Safeguarding should begin before the emergency
Safeguarding refers to all the steps taken to proactively support children’s well-being and the prevention of harm. Within the ECD sector, safeguarding cannot be understood narrowly as "keeping children physically unharmed in the moment." It should be taken as an overall everyday discipline: who is allowed through the gate, how visitors are verified, how many adults are present relative to the number of children, how transport is vetted before a trip is approved, and what protocols exist when something looks even slightly out of place. Indeed, the Ministry of Education has since emphasized its May 2026 guidelines to this effect.
Young children between the ages of one and eight are uniquely vulnerable. They cannot assess risk and cannot advocate for themselves. They are entirely dependent on the judgment of the adults around them. This dependency is what makes safeguarding in ECD settings more important than at any other level of education.
The Ministry of Education's recent suspension of school trips is an understandable and necessary short-term response. But directives issued in the aftermath of tragedy, however well-intentioned, cannot substitute for a sustained culture of safeguarding integrated in how schools and ECD centres operate day to day. That culture requires clear, enforced protocols for vehicle inspection and driver vetting before any trip is approved; strict, non-negotiable procedures for verifying who enters a school compound and why; adequate adult-to-child supervision ratios, particularly at the pre-primary level; and regular training for teachers and caregivers, not as a one-off exercise, but as an ongoing part of their professional development.
This is the space in which teacher training programmes, ECD support organisations, and school administrators must play a deliberate role, not only in nurturing literacy and numeracy but also in equipping the adults who work with young children to recognise risk, follow protocol, and treat safeguarding as a daily responsibility rather than a checklist item.
That as it may be, we are also conscious of the fact that implementing these guidelines comes with a cost that many parents, schools, and even our government continuously fail to part with, owing to the difficult financial times. Vetted drivers, roadworthy vehicles, trained security personnel, functional CCTV, and adequately staffed classrooms are not free. For a government working with a meagre 7.82% allocation to the education sector, and for schools operating on thin margins in an economy where many parents already struggle to pay school fees, safety measures can easily be viewed as a cost to be deferred rather than a cost to be borne.
This is why safeguarding requires deliberate, shared investment from government, from institutions, and from development partners alike, because the alternative cost, as we have now tragically seen twice over, is far higher than any budget line.
As a country with 21.8% of our population enrolled in either pre-primary or primary school, we owe it to every child and every parent who entrusts a child to a school's care, to make safety a standard we build into our systems from the outset, and not a lesson we are forced to learn after it is too late.