Clear the air: Charlotteans share initiative in Ghana 

CLEANAIRE NC

CleanAIRE NC director of programs and impact Daisha Wall (center) leads a discussion on deploying air quality sensors in Ghana as part of an exchange program sponsored by the U.S. State Department and IREX. CleanAIRE NC development director Madison Fragnito is third from left.

Daisha Wall’s expertise is helping Africans breathe easier.

Wall, director of programs and impact at Charlotte-based CleanAIRE NC, spent two weeks in Ghana recently as part of the Mandela Washington Reciprocal Exchange Program sponsored by the U.S. State Department and IREX, a global development and education initiative. She consulted with the Ghana Environmental Protection Agency and local stakeholders in CleanAIRE For All, an international collaboration on environmental capacity. 

Wall and CleanAIRE NC development director Madison Fragnito deployed air quality monitors in Techiman, a city in Ghana’s Bono East Region 65 miles northeast of Kumasi. They trained Ghana EPA staff on their maintenance, data analysis and communication strategies. 

Wall and Fragnito also promoted air quality awareness among students and stimulate interest in the environment and climate change. 

“From a personal standpoint, just taking work out of it, obviously, I’m a Black woman, African American,” Wall said. “I have always wanted to make it to any country in Africa, but Ghana in particular was just such an exciting opportunity for me, just to be able to connect with the homeland, essentially. I have a lot of ancestry from Ghana, and so that was just a really cool experience for me. 

“I recognize it's a once in a lifetime opportunity – some people don’t even make it out of the country – so from a personal standpoint, super exciting. But also, I will say it made me recognize my privilege a lot more. It was just interesting, navigating through cultural differences.”

Environmental awareness has become more global in scope in recent years as climate change has been linked to an increasing number of major weather events from wildfires to tsunamis. Although western nations have taken the lead in creating strategies for limiting pollution from greenhouse gases and other human-driven impacts – with varying results – the Ghana initiative continues the process.

“The CleanAIRE for All project offers a practical and scalable approach to improving air quality and public awareness in Ghana,” said Huda Ibrahim, assistant program officer at Ghana’s EPA who invited the Americans to share their knowledge in her country after spending six months at CleanAIRE NC. “It also provides a strategic avenue to strengthen the Ghana Environmental Protection Authority's leadership in sub-national air quality monitoring.” 

Said Wall: “Leading up to the process, we wanted to make sure that the project would be as sustainable, applicable, culturally responsive as possible, and that we were making the most impact. We didn’t want to just focus on air quality monitoring. We actually extended a lot of branches in this two-week project into health and education, but from the monitoring standpoint, and why they wanted us to go over there is because in Ghana, there are not many reference stations like we have here in the United States.” 

Ghana’s air quality reference stations are operated by the operated by the federal government. An obstacle for Wall and Fragnito was a lack of internet access, especially in rural communities. They had to figure how to install monitors to make data collections for air quality strategies.

“It was a huge challenge, especially deploying those sensors that required Wi-Fi, but we were very quick on our feet,” Wall said. “We ended up employing … a local electrician who because some places the internet wouldn’t reach as far … connected it to an existing wire system in (a) home so it could be placed in certain areas where it could reach Wi-Fi. 

“We immediately recognized that our first deployment that being in this rural setting with not as much access to the things that we have access here to is extremely difficult. I think just in terms of the prowess or the ability to kind of take those things to the next steps in those issues that we came up across in deployments, the EPA was really fast on their feet to come up with solutions.”

The need for sensors and data collection is especially critical in Ghana, where pollution standards are less strict than in the United States. The major causes of air pollution in that country, Wall said, are uncontrolled burning and dust exposure.

“It’s going to be a long road, mostly because standards are so different,” she said. “In the United States, there’s some debate now, because the Trump administration is trying to strike down this rule, but there was a rule made last year to decrease our exposure for particle pollution, or particulate matter, which is what we measure, from 12 micrograms per cubic meter to 9. … Essentially, they estimated that it would save thousands of lives a year, because air quality is one of the leading causes of death globally as well as in the United States. 

“In Ghana, it’s 35 [micrograms] – that’s their annual standard, so it’s a lot higher. There’s going to be challenges in terms of seeing the reduced health risk, because even if these sensors are showing that they’re staying under attainment of that 35 micrograms per cubic meter, that is still an insanely high number that should be lowered to protect health.”

For Wall, working with Ghanaians was a revealing experience. The U.S. environmental movement includes a growing presence of Black Americans, but for two weeks, she shared goals and heritage with people who look like her. 

“It felt really cool, being surrounded by people that look like me,” Wall said, “and I’m usually, especially as a Black woman in the environmental space, the only person [of color] in a room” in the U.S. “So being around all of these people, it was really incredible. In terms of just the perspective of how different it was between the U.S. and Ghana, I think that there’s just a lot of opportunity. 

“There’s things that we know that they don’t, but there’s also things that they know that we don’t, and so being able to collaborate effectively in that way, and using their knowledge on the ground actually put some things in my mind that we need to have available here when we’re out in the field doing deployments. … They helped me in my process as well.”

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