MONROVIA – Three years ago, no institution in Liberia could say with scientific certainty what the nation’s citizens were breathing; today, that data not only exists but has earned the country a place on the world stage, after the United Methodist University’s (UMU) groundbreaking Clean Air Liberia initiative received the 2025 EPIC Air Quality Fund Milestone Award at the Africa Clean Air Forum. The honor, shared with technical partner the Kigali Collaborative Research Center, places Liberia among only seven countries worldwide – alongside The Gambia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana, Pakistan, Malawi, and Nigeria – singled out for reshaping national conversations around clean air, a distinction few expected a young Liberian university to claim. THE ANALYST reports.
A University That Chose to Lead
For most of its history, UMU’s mission centered on the classroom, but Clean Air Liberia has rewritten that story. Through the initiative, the university helped establish Liberia’s first long-term air-quality monitoring network – a system now generating continuous, credible data on particulate pollution in a country that, until recently, had none at all.
That data, officials say, is doing far more than sitting in a database. It is powering public awareness campaigns, informing health advocates, and giving policymakers something they never had before: evidence. The award, presented in recognition of the project’s leadership in transforming how Liberia understands, monitors, and responds to air pollution, is a statement about what a Liberian university can become when it decides its mission does not end at the lecture hall.
Beating Long Odds
The scale of the achievement becomes clearer against the numbers. In 2024, the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC), one of the world’s leading authorities on air-quality data and policy, received 322 applications from more than 74 countries competing for its Air Quality Fund, and only 31 projects were selected for grants to expand monitoring where it is needed most.
Clean Air Liberia was one of them, and at this year’s Milestone Award Ceremony it stood out again – not merely for launching monitoring infrastructure, but for making its data public, accessible, and genuinely useful to the people and institutions who need it. Christa Hasenkopf, Director of EPIC’s Clean Air Program, said the award-winning projects demonstrate what is possible when communities on the front lines of air pollution are given the resources and the trust to lead their own solutions, adding that open, credible data is proving to be among the most powerful tools countries have for shaping policy and accelerating real action on clean air.
Why It Matters for Every Liberian
Air pollution is no abstraction in Liberia. It is the smoke from waste burning in city neighborhoods, the exhaust of aging vehicles on Monrovia’s roads, the dust rising from unpaved streets, and the fumes from household cooking fuels that families inhale every single day, and for years the true scale of that exposure was invisible, undocumented, and unmeasured.
Clean Air Liberia is changing that reality one data point, one monitoring station, and one public report at a time. Because the data is public, it belongs not only to researchers but to every community, journalist, health worker, and policymaker who needs it to make better decisions.
The Road Ahead
For UMU, the recognition cements its emergence as a serious center for environmental research and sends a signal across Liberia’s higher-education landscape that universities need not wait on the sidelines of national development. The achievement also reflects sustained collaboration with the Kigali Collaborative Research Center, the University of Ghana, and national partners who backed the initiative from its earliest days.
University authorities stress that the award is momentum rather than a finish line. As Liberia continues to confront pollution from vehicles, waste burning, household fuels, and urban dust, the recognition has opened the door to expanding the monitoring network and embedding clean air more firmly in the nation’s public health, climate, and development agendas – proof, written in data, that Liberia’s air-quality challenges can be measured, understood, and ultimately solved.