Nairobi, like many cities in Africa, has a high percentage of residents living in informal settlements (Goodfellow and Taylor, 2009), where high levels of PM 2.5 have been recorded (Egondi et al., 2016 Muindi et al., 2016 deSouza, 2020). Outdoor and indoor particulate matter concentrations are particularly high in Africa’s informal settlements, which are often located near roads and industry, are characterised by housing with limited ventilation and are home to people that predominantly rely on solid fuels for cooking (Bruce et al., 2000 Shupler et al., 2020). Despite scientific knowledge from the research community about the impacts of air pollution on health, and various global, regional and local campaigns and interventions, this problem still persists. Air pollution has also been linked to increased severity of outcomes during the Covid-19 pandemic (Conticini et al., 2020 Wu et al., 2020).
Air pollution-related health effects also negatively impact the resilience, productivity and well-being of people, putting extra burden on national economies due to health costs and loss of productivity (e.g.
The Global Burden of Disease 2015 study (Forouzanfar et al., 2016) estimated that PM 2.5 (fine particulate matter) alone was associated with 920,000 premature deaths annually in Africa. Air pollution is the leading environmental risk factor (after sanitation) for human health, in particular for respiratory and cardiovascular diseases (Hoek et al., 2013 Ritchie and Roser, 2017 WHO, 2018a) as well as preterm births (DeFranco et al., 2016). Tackling air pollution is essential for achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) including Goal 3: Good Health and Wellbeing, Goal 7: Affordable and Clean Energy and Goal 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities. While we acknowledge that this research approach is more time consuming than traditional approaches, we urge other researchers wishing to address multifactorial problems, such as air pollution to use a mixture of qualitative, participatory and creative methods to engage with a wide range of stakeholders to elicit new and unexpected understandings that may not otherwise emerge. The methods used also allowed us to communicate about the topic with a wide audience. Together, we uncovered contrasting definitions of air pollution, differing perceptions of who was responsible for enacting solutions, and overall a view that air pollution cannot be seen in isolation from the other issues faced by settlement residents. Researchers worked collaboratively with local residents to develop a range of methods to explore understandings of air pollution including interviews, storytelling, participatory mapping and theatre. Designing solutions therefore requires in-depth exploration of relevant issues with stakeholders. Often this is because they fail to account for local knowledge, cultural practices and priorities of the intended recipients. Air pollution is a well-documented major human health issue, but despite many air pollution reduction interventions designed to improve health, these are frequently ineffective. We present novel co-created transdisciplinary research that uses arts and humanities methods to explore air pollution in an informal settlement (Mukuru) in Nairobi, Kenya. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume 8, Article number: 285 ( 2021) Using a co-created transdisciplinary approach to explore the complexity of air pollution in informal settlements