COLLABORATION MEETING BETWEEN THE UNIVERSITY OF NAIROBI & THE RESEARCH CENTER FOR TOXIC CHEMICALS IN ENVIRONMENT(RECETOX), CZECH REPUBLIC

The Department of Chemistry hosted the Minister of Environment from Czech Republic, Mr. Pter Hladik and the Ambassador of Czech Republic to Kenya  for a collaboration meeting on 6th February 2025 at the Faculty of Science & Technology Boardroom, University of Nairobi.

The collaboration between the Department of Chemistry & RECETOX has been mainly in the area of Monitoring of Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) in the Environment, contributing towards the implementation of Global Monitoring Plan (GMP) whose objective is to provide globally Comparable monitoring data. Availability of Globally Comparable data is one of the requirements for effective evaluation, under article 16 of the Stockholm Convention.

Through this collaboration, Research Centre for Environmental Chemistry and Ecotoxicology(RECETOX) has supported Kenya and 14 other countries in Africa to establish POPs monitoring network for Ambient air. The network is called MONET Africa.

This collaboration between RECETOX/UON and other African States has resulted into important outputs that includes the following;

1. About 100 scientists from African institutions have been trained in the area of POPs sampling and analysis since 2007. Three (3) staff from the University have benefited from these RECETOX summer school trainings.
2. Establishment of an Air Monitoring Network called MONET Africa which was established in 2008 and is running up to date. One of these background sites for Air monitoring is located on Mt. Kenya, and is operated by the University of Nairobi.
3. Provision of Passive air sampling devices and Active air samplers. The Active samplers are used for calibration of passive samplers in Africa- one Active sampler station is at the University of Nairobi, and the second station is in Ghana.
4. Hosting data from MONET Africa monitoring programme under the Global Monitoring Plan (GMP) data warehouse. This data is updated made available to the region regularly for preparation of Africa regional monitoring reports that have been submitted to the Conference of the Parties to the Stockholm Convention in 2009, 2015 and 2022.
5. Joint research and publications between RECETOX and University of Nairobi Staff.