By Dr. Ruaraidh Dobson
Air pollution kills 8 million people per year, more than tobacco, alcohol or obesity. In urban areas in the Global South the air is dirtier than ever—in the developing megacities of Africa and South Asia, urbanisation and industrialisation are driving worsening pollution, causing economic harm, illness, and death. Even as philanthropic spending on air quality has skyrocketed from $9 million in 2015 to $71 million in 2022 (the latest year for which data has been published), we haven’t made a dent in that trend.
To be clear, huge successes have been achieved by many organisations, chief among them the Clean Air Fund (CAF, where I was Head of Data until last year). We now have more data about air quality than ever before, and philanthropy has been central to that achievement. Low-cost sensor networks are now a mature technology, where once CIFF and Bloomberg funded the concept in the Breathe London network. Satellite-based monitoring has given us baseline data on pollution worldwide for the first time ever. And more data is freely available globally than ever before thanks to efforts like OpenAQ, funded from the start by CAF.
But that growth in measurement has not been matched by improvements in air quality management. We’ve made great strides in raw data, but data is not enough. It must be translated into effective policy, implemented fully and evaluated carefully before we can say we’ve made real change. And that takes time—much longer than typical philanthropic funding cycles allow.
The result has been that we fund exciting, innovative pilots and proof-of-concept projects with new technologies, but drop the ball when it comes to implementation. There are lots of sensor networks out there sending their data into the void, or successful early intervention trials that never went mainstream, because attention faded and long-term plans were out of scope for the funding body. CAF’s 2024 report on air quality philanthropy showed that communication, events and awareness received 30 percent of total funding from 2015–2022, almost $100 million. Implementation, however, was the lowest funded project category.
The big wins in air quality don’t happen overnight. They’re long, slow projects of capacity-building and infrastructure shaping, building institutions and creating career paths where they haven’t existed before.
A great example is in Nairobi, Kenya. I conducted research there in 2019, and our partners at the Kenya Medical Research Institute were capable, enthusiastic academics. But nowhere in East Africa had the equipment we needed to measure air pollution correctly—or even calibrate our sensors.
But when I visited last year for the Africa Clean Air Network’s conference, I saw a state-of-the-art lab filled with researchers at the top of their field. Co-funded by KEMRI and the UK’s National Institutes for Health Research, the Air Pollution Centre of Excellence is giving policymakers, scientists, and educators the tools to make real change by and for the Kenyan people. And that has already paid dividends, including in the recent launch of Breathe Nairobi’s citywide sensor network, as a thriving field of research and practice has grown. But it takes a long time to see those dividends, much longer than an annual report allows, and it doesn’t photograph as well as a sensor on a lamppost. And sadly, it’s the exception rather than the rule: sub-Saharan Africa received just $1.3 million of philanthropic air quality funding in 2022 (compared to $71 million globally).
For funders, this is a rational response to incentives. When we fund the same few people, particularly people in the Global North, we know what we’ll get. It’s easy to make a case for funding Columbia, Oxford, or MIT when you’re asking your board to spend a million dollars. It’s harder to argue that you should take a chance on a new, small charity in a poor country, even for far less money. I’ve certainly failed to make that argument in the past.
But air pollution isn’t the same everywhere, and it’s not a straightforward engineering problem. Local people have social, cultural, and economic context that outside experts can’t replicate. Raw data about emissions and pollutant concentrations won’t matter without deep knowledge of root causes.
Over-reliance on Global North-based academics and consultants with impressive CVs creates fewer opportunities for in-country experts to grow their skills and risks creating a closed circle. People in the Global South have the knowledge, ability and enthusiasm to make change for themselves, and they deserve the chance to do so.
Instead of narrowing our focus, we need to widen it. And there are promising signs that the field is moving in that direction. The EPIC Air Quality Fund (launched in 2024) has had extraordinary impact with very little money. By focusing on small grants ($25-50,000) in least-developed countries and a worldwide network of mentors, EPIC has laid the groundwork for researchers and activists in some of the places most in need of action on clean air.
We need to follow that approach through the life course of air quality interventions. Building new routes to fund adoption pathways for successful change could make the difference. Supporting the implementation of ambitious projects we know can work by funding long-term positions in local governments, charities and universities. Developing new analytic tools to make the case that interventions pay for themselves in health and wealth. Creating new granting and procurement models which take a longer term approach. All of these could help expand what’s possible worldwide.