Practical
Affordable, deployable, maintainable, and useful in real settings such as homes, schools, clinics, workplaces, public spaces, and emergency-response locations.
Open Air Foundation
Practical Public Infrastructurefor Airborne Environmental Health
Every person breathes roughly 10,000 liters of air each day, but the infrastructure to detect and reduce airborne risks is unevenly distributed. The Open Air Foundation builds open tools, trusted data, and practical resources, while providing the grants, training, and support communities and partners need to use, adapt, and build on them.
For OAF, practical public infrastructure is the shared layer that helps communities, schools, clinics, researchers, and public-interest partners detect airborne risks, understand local evidence, and act on it.
Public
Built for public benefit through open tools, transparent data practices, reusable guidance, responsible governance, and local ownership.
Infrastructure
Durable systems others can build on, not one-off donations: hardware, software, data, documentation, grants, training, and feedback loops.
Community Air Quality in Practice: Lagos, Nigeria
Local evidence helped make smoke exposure visible.
In a Lagos fish-smoking community, local monitoring helped make invisible exposure visible. The data supported a clearer case for changing how smoke exposure was being managed. The Lagos Environmental Protection Agency later installed smokeless eco-kilns, showing how local evidence can help connect community concern with practical intervention.
Detect
Low-cost open monitoring tools make outdoor and indoor airborne risks visible where public data is missing.
Understand
Open data systems, dashboards, interpretation support, and training turn measurements into trusted local evidence.
Protect
Evidence supports cleaner indoor air, filtration, ventilation, smoke and dust response, public communication, advocacy, and reduced exposure.
Why This Matters
Airborne risks to health are local. Too often, the infrastructure is missing.
Communities cannot protect health, improve indoor and outdoor environments, or advocate for cleaner air without trusted local evidence, practical tools, and support to use them.
The missing layer
Air pollution, indoor air quality, ventilation, wildfire smoke, mould, and airborne infection are often treated as separate problems. But for communities, these issues are interconnected: they all affect the air people breathe at home, at school, at work, and in public spaces. Too often, people lack the basic tools and information they need to understand these risks and do something about them — reliable local data, affordable monitoring, practical guidance, and support to act.
Under-monitored communities often face the highest airborne risks to health with the least access to trusted local data, so they are OAF's priority focus.
Without practice and affordable ways to measure and understand air quality, pollution, poor ventilation, smoke, dust, mould, and airborne biological hazards can be harder to identify and address. Responding to these problems takes more than measurement. It requires infrastructure such as open tools, data, practical guidance, training, grants, and protection methods that public-interest partners can use.
The path forward
Measurement is useful if it leads to behaviour change. OAF helps communities use evidence to make practical decisions: when to run filtration, how to improve ventilation, where to focus advocacy, and how to respond when smoke, dust, pollution, or infection risk becomes imminent.
- Low-cost open tools make airborne risks visible.
- Small grants and local partners turn tools into real deployments.
- Trusted local evidence supports communication, advocacy, and protection.
- Every project feeds learning back into shared infrastructure for others.
Airborne Environmental Health
Airborne environmental health with a synergetic approach.
Air quality is where much of this work starts, but the same tools and local evidence can help with a wider range of airborne risks. They can help communities understand indoor environments, assess ventilation, respond to smoke and dust, monitor environmental conditions, and make better decisions about reducing exposure.
The needs vary by place. A school might use air quality and CO₂ monitors to understand when classrooms need better ventilation or filtration. A clinic might use local data to identify where cleaner air is most important. A community facing wildfire smoke, dust, or industrial pollution might use simple monitoring tools to understand what is happening and make the case for action.
OAF helps make these tools, data, and practical approaches available to the people and organisations that need them.
Air Quality Map
Explore public air quality monitor data.
Public air quality is unevenly distributed across countries and regions. Often the most polluted regions have little or no monitoring at all.
Good Moderate Unhealthy Hazardous
Projects
Practical Infrastructure in Action
OAF-backed projects show how low-cost open tools, small grants, training, and local partnerships can generate trusted evidence, build local capacity, and make practical protection possible.
How to Work With OAF
Build practical infrastructure for airborne environmental health with us.
OAF supports local partners and funders who want to make airborne environmental health solutions practical, affordable, and available where they are needed most.
What We Build
Understand how OAF builds and stewards practical public infrastructure for airborne environmental health.
Work with OAFSmall Grants
Learn how small grants, training, technical support, and open monitoring tools help local partners deploy practical airborne environmental health solutions.
Apply nowOur Origins and Partnership
OAF builds on the open-source infrastructure developed by AirGradient, including open hardware designs, software, firmware, and the Open Source Air Quality Monitoring Toolkit developed with the UNDP Global Centre.
AirGradient's open-source monitors are already used by 50,000+ people in 90 countries, giving OAF a proven global base to build from. AirGradient has committed 5,000 air quality monitors to OAF and will support the foundation long term as a public-interest steward of this infrastructure.
OAF is separate from AirGradient. Its role is to make this infrastructure useful for public benefit: improving tools, supporting local implementation, funding community deployments, and helping under-monitored communities turn evidence into protection.