The number of deaths after a ferry capsized on a lake in Zimbabwe has risen again to 44, officials have said.

Officials previously recorded that 15 people had died in the incident on Lake ‌Kariba on Tuesday, with the number rising to 37 earlier on Wednesday.

The state broadcaster ZBC News reported that children were among the dead.

Police said in a post on X that bodies had been retrieved from the lake that forms part of the border between Zimbabwe and Zambia, but they did not update how many people were injured or missing.

They said that investigations suggest the boat ​was overloaded when it capsized during heavy winds.

Zimbabwe's national disaster management agency said 77 people had been rescued.

One of the two crew members who survived, Anyway Chambati, said: "Some of us survived by standing on top of the capsized hull."

He told ZBC: "Before it went down, passengers were screaming at us that the boat was flooding, water was pouring into the engine room and goods were spilling out."

The boat has a carrying capacity of 90 people, according to the authorities.

Mr Chambati said he was in charge of ticketing and that he counted 153 people on board, including crew and infants, before the accident.

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Multiple witnesses told the state broadcaster that passengers urged the captain to turn back as waves grew stronger, only to be dismissed.

When water surged into the vessel, panicked travellers scrambled for life jackets beneath their seats, witnesses said.

The captain was among the dead, the state-run Herald newspaper reported.

Those pulled out of the water by rescue teams, supported by an underwater search unit, were taken to Long Island, a small island on the lake.

From there, they were brought to land on CPU vessels.

President Emmerson Mnangagwa declared the incident a state of disaster.

Lake Kariba is the largest man-made lake in the world by volume, measuring 124 miles (200km) long and up to 25 miles (40km) wide in places.

It was created in the late 1950s and early 1960s by building a dam wall to block the Zambezi River, resulting in a valley slowly filling with water to form a huge lake.