Africa has stepped up efforts to improve air quality with at
least 600 monitors now installed across cities on the continent.
Speaking on Wednesday during the Clean-Air Forum in Nairobi,
AirQo Principal Investigator and Lead Engineer Bainomugisha said the goal of
the initiative is to enhance data availability.
Bainomugisha said the first three devices were deployed on a
motorbike in Kampala.
“They enabled us to have the coverage of the entire Kampala.
We were not sure how they are going to work. But fast forward 10 years,
we’ve been able to deploy about 600 devices across the continent,” he said.
He said AirQo’s strategy for the last three years has been
to reach two countries every year, and they have been able to surpass it.
According to him, the air monitors were then deployed to
Kenya after Uganda.
Bainomugisha said quality air data facilitates researchers,
policy makers who leverage it to make propositions tangible.
“It starts speaking with the numbers and evidence. When we
talk about data, we all strongly advocate that we need to have open data.
Everyone knows that we should have data that is open and accessible,” he said.
“That is how we can make progress with our commitments for
planning and actions.“
He said data must be interlinked from different sets to help
make a case, especially for the health sector.
Bainomugisha added that countries in Africa must make improvements
in transport or mobility.
“We need to be able to track how many vehicles we have in
the city, what types of vehicles are paid, and how they are contributing to
emissions, he said.
“Countries must take initiatives to measure and track our
progress.”
He emphasised the need for everyone to easily commit to
sharing the data.
According to him, data governance is about having common
principles of how countries collect, manage and share data.
“Sometimes it gets lost when we say we are all committed to
sharing data, but I think as a community we need to agree on the common
practices on how we need to do this.”
Bainomugisha said that with the evolution of Artificial
Intelligence, data has become an asset and a new resource.