“Uganda’s government has suspended all school trips in the wake of Thursday evening’s bus crash that killed at least 20 pupils and one adult who were taking part in an educational tour,” reports the BBC. (Uganda is an east African nation with 53 million people who eat lots of bananas. Ugandans eat two pounds of bananas per person every day, making them the biggest banana eaters on Earth. Uganda produces more bananas than any country except India). The BBC notes that
Dozens of others, including staff, were injured in the accident in eastern Uganda…The bus had a mechanical fault before the driver lost control on Chekwatit Hill, a stretch of road that has been the site of several serious crashes….
Uganda records thousands of road deaths a year but this incident is one of the country’s deadliest involving children in recent times.
“As an immediate precautionary measure, we must do something about the safety of our children,” Education Minister John Chrysostom Muyingo said, announcing the temporary ban. “The nation has suffered a great loss.”
Traffic police spokesman Michael Kananura described what had happened on Thursday.
“The driver reportedly lost control of the vehicle, which veered off the road, struck a large stone along the roadside, and overturned,” he said.
The bus, carrying pupils from King David Junior School in Ndejje, crashed at about 8 PM local time at Chekwatit village.
16 people have died of starvation in Uganda’s impoverished northeast due to drought. But Uganda’s central coffee-growing region is defying drought thanks to improving agricultural techniques. Uganda is one of Africa’s biggest coffee exporters.
Kenyan farmers are using artificial intelligence tools to produce much more food.
The impoverished African nation of Zambia has used artificial intelligence to find new mineral wealth.
In other good news. Niger recently became the first nation in Africa to eliminate river blindness, a disease spread by flies that breed near rivers. Those flies carry long thin parasitic worms that burrow in a victim’s skin. And the African nation of Guinea recently eradicated sleeping sickness, a parasitic disease carried by the tsetse fly that causes irreversible brain damage, aggressiveness, psychosis, and then death, if left untreated.
