Building local capacity for air quality monitoring devices in Africa: Lessons from Nigeria

The lack of industrial capacity has led to the importation of low-cost sensors to monitor air pollution in data sparse regions of Africa.  However, there are several challenges with this approach.  Most of the devices are not suitable for the climate of Africa, the “low cost” is still prohibitive in many regions of Nigeria, some of these low-cost sensors provide our data to third parties, and repairs can take a long time if possible.  To this end, the United Nations African Regional Centre initiated a campaign for the local development of low-cost air monitoring devices.  This provides the flexibility of building for our environment, designed to meet our peculiar situation especially in terms of power and internet, and ease of repair or replacement of parts.  In the last six months, several of these devices have been built to monitor particulate matter and gaseous pollutants including carbon monoxide and ozone. Our designs were found to be of comparable performance with imported low-cost sensors.   The design team will share details of design, solutions to power and internet issues, and other lessons learned.