Air pollution takes about a year off the average life expectancy in Malawi, making it among the top five health threats in the country. That threat could worsen in the years ahead without action, as the population of more than 21 million is expected to rise 77 percent by 2050 and the government is laser focused on growing and industrializing the economy.
“Government policy is to change Malawi from a consuming to a producing nation which means an increase in industrial activities,” says Chikumbusko Chiziwa Kaonga, an associate professor at the Malawi University of Business and Applied Sciences (MUBAS). More industrialization means more pollution. At the same time, Kaonga notes, population growth has led to deforestation and dust storms, and urbanization has led to more cars on the road.
Kaonga and his team are working to bring air quality data to the people of Malawi. They’re joined by another collaborative group of local actors—the Malawi Initiative for Clean Air Solutions (MIfCAS)—that is working toward the same cause.
“It’s widely known that air pollution is not only a health burden but an economic and social problem,” says Collins Gameli Hodoli, who is leading the MIfCAS effort. “While there are no concrete statistics on the economic impacts of air pollution on the Malawi economy, the joint impact of climate disasters and air pollution costs about 1.7% of the country’s GDP annually per the World Bank Group’s 2016 report. This shows that the country’s growth will be hindered if we do not strategically tie air pollution control to growth.”
Supported by the EPIC Air Quality Fund, the two teams combined have installed 24 low-cost air quality monitors in 11 districts throughout the country, with nearly all the districts receiving data about the air they breathe for the first time. MIfCAS has also installed the country’s first regulatory grade monitor at Mzuzu University.
“In the past, there was a general notion that air pollution is not a problem in Malawi, but there was no data to support this line of thinking. It is only now that the data we are generating is painting a different picture altogether,” say Kaonga, from MUBAS.
The MUBAS and MIfCAS teams hope their data will change minds and ultimately change the policy landscape. Just months after installing their first monitors, that change is already happening.
Making the invisible visible
When Hodoli was a young boy, he did his homework by the light of kerosene lamps. He didn’t know then what he knows now—that the smoke burning from those lamps was hurting his health. Even today, many people in Malawi don’t understand that air pollution is a problem.
“Air pollution is invisible,” says Hodoli.
Kaonga agrees. People in Malawi have been more concerned about water pollution because “people are able to see dirty and smelling rivers.”
The data needs to paint the picture.
“While in the region that we are in there are threats like Malaria, Tuberculosis, Cholera and non-communicable diseases, among others which can all kill, it is important for people to understand that air pollution possesses the same dangers,” says Kaonga. “So understanding that air is polluted is one step towards prevention of disease hence death.”
The MUBAS and MlfCAS teams began working with partners in and outside of the government to get their data out to real people. The Department of Climate Change and Meteorological Services (DCCMS) is using the MUBAS data to send weekly Air Quality Bulletins. This is a first step, Kaonga says, to confront the general lack of understanding of air pollution.
“The multifaceted problem of air pollution requires an inter-agency coordination between government departments, researchers, civil society organizations and a strong political will,” says Hodoli, a lecturer at the University of Environment & Sustainable Development in Ghana.
They’ve found that political will in Malawi.
Working alongside policymakers for change
Both the MUBAS and MIfCAS teams are working hand-in-hand with government agencies. The MUBAS team met with DCCMS early on and together they installed the first monitor in the capital of Blantyre. MIfCAS has representatives from DCCMS, the Malawi Environmental Protection Agency (MEPA) and the Malawi Bureau of Standards (which sets national standards) on their team. This collaboration is moving the needle.
“Government has started to view air pollution as a problem in Malawi and several actions are being taken,” says Kaonga. “On any door that we have knocked so far, we have been assisted.”
Hodoli feels the same, saying that the government is being proactive and has a keen interest in co-creating and designing clean air solutions leveraging interdisciplinary collaboration.
The MUBAS and MIfCAS data are vital because before developing targets to reduce pollution, policymakers need to know how much pollution is already in the air. They can use that information as a benchmark from which to set national pollution standards and other pollution reduction policies.
The MEPA Director Wilfred Kadewa has said they will use the data to help set Malawi’s first air quality standard, “which we are sure will come to fruition,” Kaonga says. The teams are discussing the formation of these standards with the Malawi Bureau of Standards. They’re also talking with the Directorate of Road Traffic and Safety Services to work to include emissions into the process of certifying vehicles.
Additionally, the government has drafted Malawi’s first-ever air pollution management and control rules—the Clean Air Regulation—and convened experts to discuss it, including Hodoli and Kaonga. One of the key elements of the regulation is a district-specific air quality management plan based on the specific sources of air pollution in each of the 28 districts of Malawi. These plans would be reliant on local air quality data, made possible by MUBAS and MIfCAS.
“Air quality monitoring and pollution control is not comprehensively treated in our national agenda,” said Kadewa, from MEPA. “There’s a huge gap but from the way our cities are growing, with no domain-specific data of air pollution in Malawi, nothing can be done to reduce the health burden of air pollution in the country to improve livelihoods. The academician and regulator in me is super excited about this [air quality monitoring] project.”
Kadewa has also engaged several members of the MUBAS and MlfCAS teams as authors for the National State of the Environment and Outlook Report, which is being produced for the first time in 15 years and has a chapter devoted to air pollution. Kaonga is the Lead Technical Editor.
“This will ensure that the report captures recent, accurate and relevant data for effective policy formulation and decision-making,” Kadewa said.
It’s expected the report will include recommendations for district-level management plans—building on the Malawi Clean Air Regulation’s momentum—as well as the need for capacity building, expansion of community awareness and democratization of air quality monitoring. These are all efforts the MUBAS and MlfCAS teams have underway.
MlfCAS in particular is working hard to build capacity in both the national and local governments to ensure the continued success of the monitoring. They’ve held five trainings with experts (e.g., ‘From Data to Action: Leveraging Air Quality Monitoring for Clean Air Solutions’ by Dr Sarath Guttikunda; ‘Satellite Data for Air Quality’ by Dr Carl A Malings; ‘OpenAQ Explorer and AQI Hub’ by Dr Colleen Rosales; ‘Indoor Air Quality and Global Standards’ by Mr Sotirios Papathanasiou; and ‘Air Pollution and Health, Malawi’ by Dr Safiya Cummings) and are in talks to give the staff of MEPA trainings on how to sustain this national level monitoring infrastructure. They’ve already trained local authorities to install regulatory grade monitors and plan to further build local capacity through district-specific workshops and curriculum based on needed technical skills.
Educating the public that air pollution is a serious threat
Political will is vital. But the MUBAS and MlfCAS teams also recognize they need public support to help push that political will forward, and they need the public to make changes in their own lives to allow the policy changes to be successful. To gain that support, they are working with partners on the ground to educate the public.
“We feel that more can be done if we have more partners who have a physical presence in most parts of the country” Kaonga said. The MUBAS and MlfCAS teams are working toward that. “Generally, the local partners have been great in terms of data sharing and also providing platforms through which we could share our data,” Kaonga says.
MlfCAS, consisting of members of the Ghana-based Clean Air One Atmosphere initiative, is employing lessons learned from their work on air pollution in West Africa. They plan to form local task forces in each district to monitor the sources of air pollution and to continue educating the public about reducing pollution where they can in their own lives. They will also integrate clean air science education into the primary and secondary curriculum in Malawi.
“The first step from my school of thought is to expand on the community’s understanding of the air pollution problem in Malawi,” says Hodoli, “How each of us is contributing to making the air dirtier and how we can in the meantime reduce emissions at source in our little ways.”
Both Hodoli and Kaonga have seen progress on this front.
“Overall, we have seen a mindset change towards air pollution ever since we started installing the monitors,” Kaonga says.
Not only have local companies come to him asking for monitors to be installed at their businesses, but one property management company with monitors already installed by the MUBAS group uses that data in their monthly Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) reports. Kaonga notes that if people are aware of the air pollution threat, they will take the necessary steps to mitigate the causes of air pollution. They will also push for change:
“Our constitution already stipulates that ‘everyone has a right to a clean and safe environment,’ so if citizens know their rights, they can also take industries that pollute to task.”