AirQo, the air quality project that started at Makerere University in 2015, is one of 15 finalists for the 2026 Earthshot Prize, putting it in the running for one of five £1 million awards.
AirQo is competing in the Clean Our Air category of the prize, which Prince William founded in 2020 to back solutions to the world’s biggest environmental problems. The winners will be named at an awards night in Mumbai, India, on November 17.
This year’s finalists were picked from close to 7,000 nominations across 169 countries.
Even without a win, finalist status comes with mentorship, technical support and introductions to governments, funders and technology partners to help the project grow.
From a Makerere lab to nine countries
AirQo was started by Prof Engineer Bainomugisha, a computer science professor at Makerere and now Principal of the College of Computing and Information Sciences. He began the project after noticing how much worse the air was in Kampala than in the rural Uganda where he grew up, and finding that almost no local data existed to measure it.
Conventional monitoring stations cost too much to run at the scale African cities need, so the team built cheaper monitors designed to cope with dust, power cuts and patchy internet. Some are mounted on boda bodas to map pollution street by street. AI models then calibrate the sensors, flag pollution hotspots and forecast bad-air days, and the data is published openly for anyone to use.
The network now counts more than 500 monitors in over 16 cities across nine African countries, including Uganda, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa. In Uganda, AirQo’s evidence fed into the country’s first national air quality regulations and has shaped traffic management decisions in Kampala.
“AirQo was built in Africa for the realities of African cities,” Bainomugisha said.
Why it matters on campus
AirQo is also training the next generation of African clean-air technologists. Through its DevCon programme at Makerere, more than 50 students have learned to build, diagnose and repair air quality sensors.
The project plans to grow to 10 more African cities and to reach more than 50 cities by 2030. It also plans to launch an open-source platform with a conversational AI tool that city leaders can question about pollution exposure. AirQo says it has raised $6 million from partners including Google.org, the World Bank and the Clean Air Fund.
Should Uganda be doing more about air pollution? Tell us. @campusbee.ug
