🌱 Environment

Breathe Accra: One Air Sensor per Municipal Assembly

Ghana's EPA regulates air nationally; Accra's dense measurement layer is Breathe Accra, run by a University of Cape Coast team on Clean Air Fund money. From 2022 it put one Clarity sensor in each municipal assembly of the metropolitan area, passing fifty in 2026. No ambient threshold triggers a restriction - assemblies discuss the readings and hope to enforce open-burning bylaws.

Live 📅 since 2022 ◆ Source-checked

🤖 AI-generated summary of the sources below — how this works · 🔎 Last verified 2026-08-01

🌱 Environment Air quality Sensors & IoT Health & care Open data

📊 Impact

A peer-reviewed colocation study in Accra put the EPA's low-cost network at a daily average PM2.5 of 23.4 ug/m3 over 2018-2021, 1.6 times the WHO daily guideline of 15, across 11,001 valid days. The same study tested three sensor brands against a reference Teledyne T640 and found the Clarity Node-S used here the least accurate, with a mean absolute error of 13.68 ug/m3 before correction, against 3.04 for QuantAQ and 4.54 for PurpleAir. Breathe Accra reports passing fifty sensors in May 2026, after thirteen municipal assemblies received three more each.

🎓 Lesson

Accra measures more than most African cities and can still act on almost none of it. Ghana's 2025 air quality regulations bind industry to install controls and report emissions, but no reading crosses a line and produces a consequence by itself; the lever the assemblies name is a bylaw against open burning that an officer must take to court. The sensors are also the cheap kind that a peer-reviewed test found needs local correction to be trusted.

Evidence🔬 Peer-reviewed

Scale🗺️ Regional

FundingClean Air Fund; Breathe Cities

📖 Terms in this entry: Low-emission zone · Open data · Urban data platform (UDP)

Sources

↗ Clarity - Breathe Accra: continuous urban air quality monitoringVendor and operator account: led by Prof. Kofi Amegah's team at the University of Cape Coast under the GhanaAQ project (started 2019), network deployed early 2022, 15 Clarity Node-S sensors, one per municipal assembly, partners include Ghana EPA and Ghana Health Service, funded by the Clean Air Fund.

↗ MyJoyOnline - Municipal assemblies gain real-time pollution data as Breathe Accra expands (30 May 2026)Phase two: thirteen municipal assemblies each get three more sensors, taking Accra past fifty; funding from Breathe Cities. An assembly officer names the intended lever - open-burning bylaws, prosecuted in court. The article's claim to be the sub-region's largest such network is not independently verified and is not repeated here.

↗ Environ. Sci. Technol. (2023) - Low-cost sensor intercomparison, correction factors and 2+ years of PM2.5 monitoring in AccraPeer-reviewed. Ghana EPA deployed 17 Clarity Node-S Gen I across Accra from May 2018; network daily mean PM2.5 23.4 ug/m3 (1.6x the WHO daily guideline) over 11,001 valid days; colocation against a reference Teledyne T640 found Clarity Node-S the least accurate of three brands (MAE 13.68 ug/m3) before correction.

↗ EPA Ghana - Air Quality PortalThe regulator's public real-time portal (Accra station shown: Achimota Interchange), with a six-band AQI scale and Ghana's standards of 35 ug/m3 PM2.5 and 70 ug/m3 PM10. Verified loading 1 Aug 2026. Compliance standards, not automatic triggers.

↗ Ghana News Agency - Air quality management regulations passed into law (Sept 2025)Environmental Protection (Air Quality Management) Regulations, 2025 (LI 2507): industry must install pollution controls and monitor emissions, and an Air Quality Information Management System is required. No ambient index threshold with an automatic consequence is described.

↗ EPIC / University of Chicago - How air quality data is driving policy action in GhanaFunder account, independent of Breathe Accra. Confirms LI 2507 and the revision of national standards; its own monitoring grant built a hybrid network in Tema, not Accra - kept out of this entry.

This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed above and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.

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Compare this project

🇮🇩 Court-Ordered Air Quality Monitoring · Jakarta Both dense networks whose readings trigger nothing automatically - Jakarta got its from a court, Accra from a donor. 🇳🇵 Kathmandu Metropolitan Air Quality Monitoring Dashboard · Kathmandu Nearest peer by size and youth: Kathmandu's nodes are city-run, Accra's are university-run on grant money. 🇮🇳 GRAP: Air Quality Readings as a Legal Trigger · New Delhi Related through Air quality.

Explore the wider context

📟 A Reading Is Not a Decision 🌫️ Air quality guide 🏙️ Accra city profile 🌱 Environment projects

📎 Cite this project

1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Breathe Accra: One Air Sensor per Municipal Assembly” — Accra, Ghana. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/accra-air-quality-monitoring/ (last verified 2026-08-01). Data: CC BY 4.0.

The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.

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