Integrated digital monitoring and management of air pollution in African cities

The number of people living in cities in Africa is growing faster than in any other part of the world. Poverty, lack of alternatives and limited regulations have also increased the use of polluting cars and fuels by families and small industries. This has resulted in high levels of air pollution which puts the residents at risk of different diseases. However, the governments do not have complete information on where in cities air pollution is high; nor do they know how different sources are distributed around the city. The equipment used for measuring air pollution in wealthy countries is too large and expensive to be used in African cities. Our network of African and UK universities, together with partners in government, community and industry, plans to fully map what information is needed to help control air pollution and use new forms of technologies, like data from satellites and artificial intelligence, to create new ways of measuring and monitoring air pollution in African cities.

Our network's work will lead to leveraging advances in digital technologies to obtain essential information on the levels, variations and sources of air pollution in cities in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), and enable evidence-based policies to reduce air pollution. This will in turn contribute to reducing the burden of ill health associated with air pollution in the region.

Cities in SSA are growing faster than in other region and air pollution is a major hazard to human health and wellbeing. There is now local, national and international realisation that air pollution is a barrier to achieving many of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals but there is a lack of evidence on what policies can be effective, because air pollution sources are different from high-income nations, and because we do not have data to measure the impacts of policies. Traditional monitoring technologies used in high-income settings are not suitable for cities in SSA due to cost, engineering (e.g., unreliable/intermittent electricity supply) and social (e.g., inability to deploy monitors in densely populated areas) reasons. Our network's aim is to overcome this major obstacle by leveraging advances in sensor and satellite technology, data analytics and AI to provide reliable timely information on air pollution in SSA cities. Beyond air pollution, our work will become a major advance towards a cost-effective integrated digital urban environmental health surveillance system, adapted to local infrastructure and social context