Twenty children boarded a school bus in Kapchorwa and never made it home.
That single sentence is the reason a room full of government officials, police officers and technology executives gathered in Kampala for a conference that, on paper, was about transport regulation, but in practice was about grief translated into policy.
The crash renewed a question Uganda has been asking with growing urgency for years: how many more learners have to die on the road before school transport actually becomes safe.
A Ministry Under Pressure
The Ministry of Works and Transport opened the conference with an admission that the status quo had failed.
Winston Katushabe, the Ministry’s Commissioner for Transport, Regulation and Safety, told the gathering that recent tragedies had exposed real gaps in how school transport is inspected and controlled.
“Recent road tragedies involving children highlight the need for stronger safety measures,” Katushabe said.
“The Ministry is committed to strengthening inspections of transport, including school buses, while embracing smart enforcement solutions to improve discipline and protect young lives,” he said.
Behind that statement sits a concrete new requirement.
Drivers who transport learners will now have to undergo vetting, hold a valid driving licence, and carry an official Ministry-issued badge before they can operate a school transport vehicle at all.
That badge system effectively creates a new class of certified school-transport driver, distinct from ordinary commercial drivers, a shift aimed directly at the accountability gap the Ministry says contributed to recent crashes.
What Schools Will Now Be Required To Do
The Ministry of Education and Sports arrived at the conference with its own list of immediate obligations for school administrators.
Denis Mugimba, the Ministry’s spokesperson, said government had issued Basic Requirements and Minimum Standards for Schools setting out exactly what a compliant school vehicle must look like.
Under those standards, any vehicle transporting learners must carry a valid Private Motor Omnibus licence with IOV certification, must be roadworthy, and must be driven only by someone holding a licence appropriate to that specific class of vehicle.
Mugimba also confirmed a much more immediate and visible measure.
“Among the immediate measures announced is the suspension of school study trips and tours until further notice, while the Government undertakes broader consultations and develops long-term interventions to prevent the recurrence of incidents involving learners,” he said.
In practical terms, that suspension freezes an entire category of school activity nationwide, field trips, excursions, inter-school competitions requiring travel, until the Ministry is satisfied the underlying safety gaps have been closed.
The Numbers Behind the Urgency
The scale of the problem is laid out starkly in the Traffic Annual Crime Report 2025, which found that an average of 14 people die on Uganda’s roads every single day.
Roughly two of those daily deaths are school-going children, a statistic that turns Kapchorwa from an isolated tragedy into the most visible recent example of a pattern that has been running for years.
Speeding and reckless driving were identified in the report as the leading causes of these crashes, a finding that shaped much of the conference’s focus on enforcement rather than infrastructure alone.
Michael Kananura, spokesperson for the Traffic Police Directorate, used his remarks to press for intensified enforcement specifically along the routes school transport vehicles use most.
He also pointed to the Express Penalty System, a digital traffic-fine mechanism, as a tool that needs to be leaned on harder to catch the indiscipline that keeps producing these crashes.
Where ITMS Fits In, and What It Actually Is
Much of the conference’s technology conversation centred on the Intelligent Transport Monitoring System, an agency whose name has become increasingly familiar to Ugandan motorists over the past two years but whose actual scope is still not widely understood.
ITMS describes itself as Uganda’s flagship smart transport initiative, built to enhance road safety, improve vehicle traceability, strengthen national security and modernise vehicle registration through digital number plates and connected transport technology.
The project’s roots trace back to President Yoweri Museveni’s 2021 State of the Nation Address, where he announced a digital number-plate scheme as a tool to fight motor-vehicle-related crime.
It was formally launched in November 2023, and its rollout has moved in deliberate phases rather than all at once.
Government vehicles were fitted first, in late 2023.
Motorcycles and tricycles followed in November 2024.
A third phase then targeted vehicles entering Uganda for first-time registration at border posts such as Malaba and Mutukula, beginning in January 2025.
Private and public motor vehicles across the country were brought into the system after that, completing the plate rollout in phases rather than a single nationwide switch.
Each digital plate carries an embedded RFID chip and a QR code, allowing a vehicle and its registered owner to be identified electronically rather than relying on the plate’s printed characters alone, and making the plates significantly harder to counterfeit than the metal plates they replace.
The system is designed to feed real-time vehicle data into a monitoring platform watched by police command centres, alongside a network of AI-powered CCTV cameras that ITMS says can support automatic vehicle identification and enforcement.
The Express Penalty System that Kananura referenced operates on top of this same infrastructure, using the connected cameras and plate data to detect traffic violations and issue penalties without requiring an officer to flag the vehicle down.
Running the project is Joint Stock Global Security Company, a Russian contractor awarded a ten-year contract for the scheme, which took over plate production from GM Tumpeco, the Ugandan firm that had fitted the country’s number plates for decades.
Government has consistently framed the system as a road-safety and anti-crime tool, and it is officially overseen by the Ministry of Works and Transport.
It is also, however, one of the more contested infrastructure projects in Uganda’s recent history.
Independent investigations, including reporting supported by the Pulitzer Center and analysis from digital-rights researchers, have raised concerns that the same tracking capability marketed for road safety gives Uganda’s security agencies a powerful vehicle-surveillance tool, and have questioned the cost, transparency and civil-liberties implications of a foreign-run tracking network embedded in nearly every vehicle on Uganda’s roads.
At the school-safety conference, ITMS’s own representative framed the technology strictly in road-safety terms.
Steven Turyarugayo, the project’s Public Relations Consultant, told stakeholders that its AI-powered systems were built to support exactly the kind of enforcement gap the Ministry was trying to close.
“Through our AI-powered technology, EPS can support improved vehicle identification, monitoring and enforcement while providing relevant authorities with better tools to promote compliance and accountability,” Turyarugayo said.
“We therefore believe that the Express Penalty System is what will bring a social behaviour change on the roads for the safety of our school-going children,” he said.
Technology Alone Won’t Be Enough, Stakeholders Admit
For all the emphasis on smart enforcement, the conference did not present technology as a complete solution.
Stakeholders explicitly acknowledged that no monitoring system, however sophisticated, can substitute for coordinated action across government agencies, schools, transport operators, drivers, parents and other road users.
That acknowledgment matters, because it frames the badge requirements, the roadworthiness rules and the suspended school trips not as a single fix but as parallel measures meant to close different parts of the same gap.
Stronger inspections, more responsible driving, stricter licensing compliance and better use of monitoring technology were all named as necessary components of a genuinely safer school transport system, not competing alternatives to choose between.
What Twenty Empty Seats Represent
The conference closed on a note that was less about policy mechanics and more about what the numbers actually mean.
Stakeholders said every child lost in a road crash represents a tragedy for families, communities and the country, a reminder that the Traffic Annual Crime Report’s statistic of two school-going children a day is not an abstraction.
For the families in Kapchorwa, and for every parent now sending a child to school on a bus they hope has been properly inspected, the real test of this conference will not be measured in press statements.
It will be measured in whether the next school term passes without another crash making the case for reform all over again.
