NAIROBI — Two 17-year-old students from Kiambu county in Kenya were declared winners of the Africa region Earth Prize on May 12, for a low-cost maize- and coconut-based vehicle exhaust filtration system they developed. Fredrick Njoroge Kariuki and Miron Onsarigo, students at M-PESA Foundation Academy, developed the system, HewaSafi, meaning “clean air” in Swahili, after watching friends and family suffer from diseases linked to air pollution. The Switzerland-based Earth Foundation grants the annual Earth Prize, now in its fifth year, to 13-to-19-year-olds working on solutions to environmental challenges. The HewaSafi team is now a contender for the global prize, for which public voting opens on May 18 and closes on May 27. The winner of the international edition will be announced on May 29. “The problem of air pollution was very personal to us, and that is why we started thinking about coming up with a solution,” Kariuki told Mongabay. “It was a passion before it became a project.” An image of the HewaSafi 3D prototype model. Image courtesy of Fredrick Njoroge Kariuki and Miron Onsarigo. Kariuki, who grew up in an industrialized area of Nakuru county in Kenya, developed a chronic lung disease at age 10 that still requires him to take medication weekly. Onsarigo, who grew up in western Kenya, witnessed deaths and serious illnesses associated with polluted air. Air pollution causes 4.4 million premature deaths globally each year, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Vehicular exhaust is a major source of pollution in urban areas. The…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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