Evidence for Africa's toughest environment-health challenges.

The PRECISE Network is a broadly-based group of research scientists and health advocates mainly based in the UK and Africa, including the World Health Organization. PALs leads the health geography component and aims to understand geographical influences on placental disorders of pregnancy — including hypertension, fetal growth restriction, and stillbirth — across the Gambia, Mozambique, and Kenya. Funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Global Challenge Research Fund (GCRF).

This data science project quantifies the current and future impacts of air pollution on maternal and neonatal health in sub-Saharan Africa, where air quality is deteriorating with accelerated urbanization and population growth. It focuses on the synergistic association between heat waves and air pollution, developing adaptive interventions for vulnerable populations. Partners include NIH, Wellcome Trust, WITS, HE²AT Centre, and University of California Berkeley.

An initiative addressing the persistent scarcity of environmental exposure data in sub-Saharan Africa. ETIQUET develops scalable models to estimate exposure to air pollution (PM₂.₅, NO₂) and temperature at a daily resolution across unsampled locations, integrating high-resolution satellite data, sensor networks, and epidemiological surveillance datasets using spatio-temporal kriging, land use regression, and semi-supervised deep learning. Partners: HE²AT Centre, WITS University, Midlands State University.

Sub-Saharan Africa is the most fire-affected region globally, responsible for nearly 70% of the world's burned area each year — 41% of fires being agricultural. This NIH-funded supplement addresses the knowledge gap in fire smoke exposure and birth outcomes in Africa, integrating SILAM atmospheric composition data with machine learning and distributed lag models. Partners: NIH, WITS, Finnish Meteorological Institute.