AirQo Low-Cost Air Quality Sensor Network
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1 sourced claim on this page, none individually verified yet — turn on “Sources in the text” to see each one.
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Kampala measures its air with about 100 sensors designed and built in the city itself — and the peer-reviewed verdict is PM2.5 around 41.1 µg/m³, several times health guidelines. What no reading does yet is trigger anything.
what does this mean?
The strongest source behind this entry is an independent peer-reviewed or academic study. It grades who did the looking — not how well the project went. All four grades →Part of 1001 Smart Cities — 1,167 documented projects · 🏙️ 2 more in Kampala · 🌫️ Air quality guide · 🌱 Environment projects
AirQo, founded at Makerere University in 2015, designs and builds its own low-cost air-quality monitors in Kampala and runs them across the city — roughly 100 monitors by 2022, one of the densest city networks in Africa — publishing real-time PM2.5 readings through an open platform and app, in a monitoring collaboration with KCCA and national regulator NEMA. A peer-reviewed characterisation in Environmental Science & Technology (2022, AirQo with the World Bank) measured average PM2.5 in Kampala of 41.1 µg/m³ over its study period, with exceedances of health guidelines by about 4–6 times across most study locations. The honest limit: no Kampala reading triggers anything — the data's policy vehicle is a KCCA Clean Air Action Plan targeting a 50% cut in pollutants by 2030, still being finalised in 2026.
📊 Impact
Average PM2.5 of 41.1 µg/m³ in Kampala over the peer-reviewed 2022 study period, with exceedances of health guidelines by about 4–6 times across most study locations (Environmental Science & Technology; AirQo/Makerere with the World Bank).
🎓 Lesson
Sensor density is not consequence: Kampala built one of Africa's best-measured skies with university-built hardware, but no threshold triggers action — the measurements grade a policy that is still being written.
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📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “AirQo Low-Cost Air Quality Sensor Network” — Kampala, Uganda. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/kampala-airqo-network/ (last verified 2026-08-07). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.