Climate and health partnerships
Our climate and health partnerships are working with local communities to reduce their risk of diseases caused by air pollution.
Current partnerships projects
The AIR Network is a global team of community representatives, practitioners and researchers from Kenya, Sweden and the UK.
The network's long-term aim is to create innovative, participatory solutions to air pollution and to address its effects on human health in low-resource settings in Sub-Saharan Africa.
AIR Network's research focuses on particulate matter (PM) – a pollutant that, when inhaled, can reduce life expectancy and lower a person's quality of life through respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. To reduce people's exposure to PM, the network is bringing together researchers from different disciplines and people who live and work in informal settlements (sometimes referred to as slums) to discuss the issues, raise awareness and consider potential solutions.
The partnership benefits the local populations by:
- Raising awareness of the health issues of PM
- Working with them to reduce their exposure to PM
Tupumue (let’s breathe in Swahili) is a 3-year collaborative project which aims to find out how many children from two areas in Nairobi have lung problems, and to explore children’s experiences of lung problems and air quality. Our lead partners are Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and Kenya Medical Research Institute
The Tupume team includes two researchers from the University of Portsmouth. The study is funded by a £720,000 grant from the Medical Research Council (MRC) and the National Research Foundation (NRF) of Kenya Newton Fund’s UK-Kenya Joint Partnership on Non-Communicable Diseases and an additional £100,000 from the Wellcome Trust Public Engagement Award in 2020. The team is working to develop culturally-relevant activities in Nairobi to raise awareness of lung health and air quality and collect data.
The partnership benefits:
- Residents in two communities in Nairobi who live with poor air quality by raising their awareness through song, theatre, puppetry and visual arts
- The health and wellbeing of Nairobi citizens by improving our understanding of lung health and what contributes to it
Follow Tupumue on Twitter.