At least 16 students died after an early morning fire at the dormitory of a girls’ boarding school in Kenya on Thursday, officials said.

The fire broke out shortly before 1 a.m. local time at the school, Utumishi Girls Academy, which teaches high school students in the town of Gilgil, according to Julius Ogamba, the Kenyan education minister. Gilgil is about 75 miles northwest of the capital, Nairobi.

At least 79 other students were injured in the fire, and seven of them were still being treated at a nearby hospital, Mr. Ogamba told reporters at the school.

The fire was reported at around 3:30 a.m., the Kenya Red Cross said on social media. The cause of the blaze was not immediately clear.

Photographs posted on social media by the police show the second floor of a dormitory with charred walls and smashed windows, and rescue workers leading girls, still in their pajamas, out of the building.

The dormitory housed about 200 of the school’s 815 students, according to Martha Wangari, a lawmaker who represents the area.

The latest deadly blaze came after other fires that have raised concern about safety at Kenya’s boarding schools.

In 2024, 18 children died when a fire ripped through the dormitory of a primary school housing over 300 students.

Kenya’s deadliest school fire was in 2001, when students set fire to a high school in Machakos, southeast of Nairobi, killing 67 students, according to a 2016 report by a government-appointed task force investigating school fires.

A 2020 government audit found that most schools in Kenya were ill prepared for a fire emergency and lacked working extinguishers and alarms, despite a detailed national safety manual published in 2008.

Asked whether the Utumishi Girls Academy adhered to that safety manual, Mr. Ogamba, the education minister, said, “I would urge that we wait to see, after the investigations.”