Blogs
School trips: Why Uganda should embrace virtual field visits
Teachers would still lead discussions, set assignments to assess whether the learning actually landed. Nearby excursions to local heritage sites or district museums that do not require long highway travel could continue as before. It is the long-distance, high-risk trips — the ones that put busloads of children on unfamiliar roads for six, eight, ten hours at a stretch — that deserve the most scrutiny.
School trips: Why Uganda should embrace virtual field visits
By: Admin ., Journalist @New Vision
_______________
OPINION
By Ivan Kamolu
Over 20 pupils and the founder of King David Junior School in Ndejje did not make it home from what should have been an ordinary study trip to Sipi Falls in Kapchorwa district. Their bus crashed near Chekwatit village on the night of July 16.
Other pupils were injured, some critically. The Government moved quickly, suspending all school study trips, pending a review of transport safety guidelines.
That was the right call. But it should not be a pause button that we release once the outrage fades. It should be the moment we ask a harder question: Does meaningful learning really require our children to be on the road for hours, on vehicles and routes we cannot always vouch for?
Uganda’s roads were already among the deadliest in the region long before this crash made national headlines. According to the Police’s 2025 Annual Crime Report, the country recorded 5,383 road traffic deaths last year alone — an average of about 15 people every day — and a 4.7% rise from 2024. The figures have been climbing steadily since 2022. Sadly, King David Junior School is not an isolated case in our school-trip history either.
On July 10, students from Mwebaza High School, travelling for an academic trip, were involved in a collision with a train at a railway crossing, killing a teacher and injuring pupils.
Add the countless near-misses involving overloaded buses and fatigued drivers on highways like Kampala-Jinja and Kampala-Mbarara, and a pattern emerges: our study-trip culture has been running on borrowed time.
Here is what makes this moment different from past tragedies: Uganda’s digital infrastructure has grown enormously. Smartphone ownership more than doubled between 2020 and 2024, from 7.6 million to 18.2 million devices, while broadband coverage and adult internet penetration have expanded to roughly 85 and 89 percent respectively, according to the Ministry of ICT and National Guidance. The Uganda Communications Commission has, over the last five years, set up 520 ICT laboratories in public secondary schools and subsidised high-speed internet for 400 schools nationwide.
Uganda’s roads were already among the deadliest in the region long before this crash made national headlines. According to the Police’s 2025 Annual Crime Report, the country recorded 5,383 road traffic deaths last year alone — an average of about 15 people every day — and a 4.7% rise from 2024. The figures have been climbing steadily since 2022. Sadly, King David Junior School is not an isolated case in our school-trip history either.
On July 10, students from Mwebaza High School, travelling for an academic trip, were involved in a collision with a train at a railway crossing, killing a teacher and injuring pupils.
Add the countless near-misses involving overloaded buses and fatigued drivers on highways like Kampala-Jinja and Kampala-Mbarara, and a pattern emerges: our study-trip culture has been running on borrowed time.
Here is what makes this moment different from past tragedies: Uganda’s digital infrastructure has grown enormously. Smartphone ownership more than doubled between 2020 and 2024, from 7.6 million to 18.2 million devices, while broadband coverage and adult internet penetration have expanded to roughly 85 and 89 percent respectively, according to the Ministry of ICT and National Guidance. The Uganda Communications Commission has, over the last five years, set up 520 ICT laboratories in public secondary schools and subsidised high-speed internet for 400 schools nationwide.
That infrastructure is a foundation we have barely used for learning. The Ministry of Education and Sports, working with the Ministry of Tourism, Uganda Communications Commission, Uganda Wildlife Authority, schools and local content creators, should commission a national digital library of curriculum-based virtual tours. High-quality video, drone footage, 360-degree recordings and guided narration could bring Sipi Falls, Murchison Falls National Park, Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, the Kasubi Tombs and the Uganda Museum straight into classrooms in Kanungu, Yumbe, Budaka, Kaabong or Kabale, places whose learners may never otherwise see these sites at all, virtually or physically.
Teachers would still lead discussions, set assignments to assess whether the learning actually landed. Nearby excursions to local heritage sites or district museums that do not require long highway travel could continue as before. It is the long-distance, high-risk trips — the ones that put busloads of children on unfamiliar roads for six, eight, ten hours at a stretch — that deserve the most scrutiny.
There is also a quieter, everyday case for this shift. Many schools charge parents anywhere from sh50,000 to well over sh250,000 per trip once transport, entry fees and meals are added up — on top of school fees already stretching household budgets amid a rising cost of living. A well-produced virtual tour, once created, can be replayed by thousands of learners in hundreds of schools, year after year, at a fraction of the cost of bussing even one class to Sipi Falls and back.
Ugandan learners have never needed to set foot in Canada to understand the Canadian Prairies, or visit the Amazon to grasp why it matters to the world’s climate. Generations of us studied the Ngoni migrations and oil exploration in West Africa through maps, diagrams and a teacher’s chalk-drawn illustrations — and still passed our exams and built a working understanding of the world. Drone footage and immersive video are simply a sharper version of the same tool.
No screen will fully replace standing at the edge of Sipi Falls with the spray on your face, or walking beneath the canopy in Bwindi. Nobody is arguing otherwise. But if a safer, cheaper, more scalable alternative can deliver most of that same educational value while sparing families the anguish that gripped Ndejje this week, Uganda owes it to its children to take that alternative seriously. Sometimes the most important lesson a nation can learn is knowing when to change course.
The writer is an education consultant.
Teachers would still lead discussions, set assignments to assess whether the learning actually landed. Nearby excursions to local heritage sites or district museums that do not require long highway travel could continue as before. It is the long-distance, high-risk trips — the ones that put busloads of children on unfamiliar roads for six, eight, ten hours at a stretch — that deserve the most scrutiny.
There is also a quieter, everyday case for this shift. Many schools charge parents anywhere from sh50,000 to well over sh250,000 per trip once transport, entry fees and meals are added up — on top of school fees already stretching household budgets amid a rising cost of living. A well-produced virtual tour, once created, can be replayed by thousands of learners in hundreds of schools, year after year, at a fraction of the cost of bussing even one class to Sipi Falls and back.
Ugandan learners have never needed to set foot in Canada to understand the Canadian Prairies, or visit the Amazon to grasp why it matters to the world’s climate. Generations of us studied the Ngoni migrations and oil exploration in West Africa through maps, diagrams and a teacher’s chalk-drawn illustrations — and still passed our exams and built a working understanding of the world. Drone footage and immersive video are simply a sharper version of the same tool.
No screen will fully replace standing at the edge of Sipi Falls with the spray on your face, or walking beneath the canopy in Bwindi. Nobody is arguing otherwise. But if a safer, cheaper, more scalable alternative can deliver most of that same educational value while sparing families the anguish that gripped Ndejje this week, Uganda owes it to its children to take that alternative seriously. Sometimes the most important lesson a nation can learn is knowing when to change course.
The writer is an education consultant.