PhDing, Data, Air Quality and Health

For years, conversations about air pollution in Kenya, as in many other low- and middle-income countries, often began and ended with one solution: plant more trees. It was a comforting response. Tree planting is visible, familiar and easy to rally behind. But its simplicity also reduced a complex public health crisis to a single environmental intervention. It obscured the transport systems, household energy choices, industrial emissions, waste-burning practices and institutional failures that shape the air Kenyans breathe every day. By 2023, poor air quality was estimated to contribute to approximately 23,000 deaths annually in Kenya, with household air pollution accounting for a substantial share of the burden. Yet air pollution is still too often discussed as if it were only an environmental concern. It is also a transport problem, an energy problem, a climate problem and, above all, a public health crisis. For a long time, however, that crisis remained abstract. What changed? Data. ...

I had the privilege of attending the Clean Air Forum 2025, held in Nairobi, Kenya, from 15th to 17th July. Previous forums happened in Kampala, Uganda, and Lagos, Nigeria. The meeting brought together a room full of funders, policymakers, researchers, health workers, media representatives, government officials, and tech experts who are shaping how Africa thinks and acts about air quality and health. Some of my main takeaways from the event include the following.  The Global South is keeping up or attempting to catch up in the hardware game, in efforts to carry out better air quality monitoring and have data. Companies in East and West Africa in partnership with funders in the Global North disseminate a significant number of low-cost sensors that measure PM2.5. These instruments, however, are limited to measuring only PM2.5. It is important that instrumentation used in the Global South be suitable for the region to produce accurate results. We therefore have initiatives like air qua...

So I am not a very good reader of papers, I am a "lazy" one, actually lazy no quotes, or I get distracted very easily. Literally if anything comes up as I am reading I will abandon that ship fast. Or I do this thing where I will read a sentence and get excited by an idea or confused by the concept, so google that, be more interested in the thing I googled, want to learn the thing from zero and be good in the 15 minutes I diverted, and then remember and go back to the other thing but I forgot the meaning of the sentence because I also lost train of thought trying to learn. Even when it’s genuinely interesting to me. It just happens. Check this image. And I hated it for a long time, I hated me because which scientist is a slow reader? (many actually), and many of them don't like to read either, I hated that that's how my brain works. Also it is not an issue of interest, I genuinely am interested and love what I do, it does give me so much joy. None the less, The whole d...

After spending the first year of my PhD figuring out the direction of my research, I feel more certain than ever that I am in the right place at the right time. This might not seem like a big realization or feat. Still, for a PhD student in the UK coming from Africa and has “grown up” in research hearing about scooping, helicopter science, and brain drain, and wanting to do something that contributes to the reduction of the gap between the Global North and South, it becomes something big to find conviction.   Doing my master’s research during the COVID era was a blessing in disguise, yet a confusing time. Being introduced to open science concepts, and seeing open data practices in action sparked my interest. This era seemed to remove aspects of embargos, scooping, and all the things I had heard for a long time. There was a free flow of knowledge and data. I completed my master's thesis and explored the health informatics space to get a clear view of how data flowed within rese...