BLACK EARTH - SEASON 4 EPISODE 1, AGNES AGYEPONG === [00:00:00] Agnes Agyepong: If you're listening to this point, you'll listen for a few more seconds. Yeah. There's always this expectation on black and minoritized, less indigenous, less communities, that from the get go, we are gonna do this and we're gonna have to do it perfectly. And actually when we then have project funding that's only six months or 12, basically short term project funding, we are not able to actually be experiential and say, okay, let's test things out with the community. Let's then look at the learning from that and take that learning into something that now will have a long-term benefit to the community even after funding has gone. [00:00:37] Marion Atieno Osieyo: Hi everyone. Welcome to Black Earth. Black Earth is an award-winning podcast and community celebrating Mother Earth and the incredible black women leaders who are restoring our relationship with Mother Earth. I'm Marion and I'm the creator and host of Black Earth, and I am so grateful, so honored, so excited to be in conversation with such visionary women who are showing us what true leadership looks like in the 21st century. In today's episode, I meet with Agnes Agyepong, who is the founder and CEO of Global Child and Maternal Health. I first came across Agnes two years ago when we met at an event in London on clean air Justice, and I was so inspired by the work that she was doing because it was so niche and so necessary. Agnes does research and engagement on the impacts of air pollution on black pregnant women, black mothers and black children in London and the UK. In this conversation, we speak about air pollution, but we also speak about the research and the importance of research, true community centered research in helping us address. And develop effective policies for clean air. Agnes and I also get to speak about one of my favorite topics ever, which is joy, and how black women can center joy and rest and ease and pleasure in the way that we live and the way that we work. As you can see in this episode, the sun was setting on my end because I'm currently in Indonesia, but the conversation continued. And this is one of the reasons why I created Black Earth, because even when the light darkens, the conversations in our communities continue. So I hope you enjoy this episode and that you are inspired by the work that Agnes and her organization do and the way in which they do their work. Thank you and thank you Agnes, for your leadership and your support. Agnes, we have a lot to cover today. [00:02:51] Agnes Agyepong: I've got time, I've got for days. [00:02:55] Marion Atieno Osieyo: Thank you so much. Firstly, Agnes, for. Joining me today. I'm so excited for our conversation because I feel like it's been years in the making. The first time I met you was two years ago, at a panel at the Mayor of London, and we were speaking about clean air justice and how to make sure the perspectives of the most affected communities are being centered in policymaking and research. And I was so impressed by the work that you were doing then. And so it's been a real honor to finally get the chance to speak to you about this, in the podcast basically. I say thank [00:03:31] Agnes Agyepong: You for having me on and like I first of all just see it as such an honor to be in this space. I love what you've created and the work that you are doing. So to be here, to be speaking with you. Today. Yeah. Is just a massive honor. I just wanna share that love back to you. [00:03:48] Marion Atieno Osieyo: Oh, thank you. The first question I ask all my guests. Is, how would you describe your relationship with nature? [00:03:57] Agnes Agyepong: That is such an interesting question because I would, on one part, I would say I don't really have a relationship with nature. And I say that because I'm born and raised in Southeast London. When I just think about like, when I step out of my house, there's lots of concrete very few kind of trees or proper green spaces. And so I would say that my, my kind of everyday relationship in terms of my, the work that I do, getting on the trains, the buses, I'm not really being, I'm not really having an embodied experience like with nature, right? So that would be my kind of, if I'm just coming from a place of truth, that is what I would say. But on the other side, I would say that my relationship with nature is one and the same. Like we can't remove ourselves from nature, the air that we breathe the food that we eat, right? Even I think I was saying to you earlier, it's been like a heat wave here and now it's raining and it feels like I'm in England, but I'm in a monsoon and so forth. That's part of my embodied experience of nature. That's just how I'm experiencing get up in morning, dropping my kids to school, so it's two of the same, and I make that distinction because I remember during COVID I took my children to the Cotswolds. That's probably been one of the best holidays that my children have ever had. And that's when I really, first of all, I felt like a really bad mom because I was like. I, when I'm in London, I hold onto my children so tightly. Yeah. Crossing the road, walking. But in the countryside you just see the children just running off freely in the nature, and the children feel so much more calmer because of it, because they have this one and the same experience with the nature. They don't feel like they're restricted and they say much space, and I have that for my children, to make that distinction between I don't have a relationship just because of like my built environment, but I really do understand that I do have a relationship because it's, it makes up everything that I do, live experience, feel in the world. [00:05:53] Marion Atieno Osieyo: That's so powerful. Thank you so much for sharing that, Agnes. And, last summer I used to volunteer at this education charity in Brixton called Baytree Centre, and they're a charity for women and girls. Especially who are migrants or refugees. And last summer I worked with one of the team members to organize a nature day out for the girls. And when we came, when they arrived at 8:00 AM at that center, they were not feeling it, they were not feeling anything. But the minute we arrived at this farm in Kent, they were so free. They were so curious. I'd never seen such curiosity in children, like they were curious about everything and they were so creative, like the way they were playing like in nature and making up games and learning how to cook together and share the tasks. I was just like, wow, what a difference the environment makes, the transition from like Brixton to Kent and just seeing how their personalities changed. That was like eye opening for me. [00:07:02] Agnes Agyepong: And I love the fact that you hit on the word personality because a lot of the talk that we do is around obviously when we're talking about climate justice, we're talking about direct things to our health as in the air that we breathe, the, the heat waves and so forth, the floods and how that is a material impact. But personality. If I decode that we're talking about the mental health thing of our children, right? How much freedom that they felt. And I saw that instantly like my son who would be like, oh my God, he gets hyper at that time he must have been worked. I have two sons. So they were like two and three. And at that time I'm like, oh, my got two boys. And you never all over the place. No. They are not meant to be in confined spaces. They're not meant to be so restricted and when they're actually able to be free within the environment, their personalities took on a completely different. Persona, right? Yeah. Which impacts their mental health and also my mental health as a mom because Yeah. Running around like this farm hold. And I was like, why is that my default reaction to run and hold? And all the other women were with their children same age and even younger, and they were just like really and truly children couldn't do anything wrong because it's just space. And they, and I had to, as a parent, realize I'm acting not as out of a position of parental, being, but just out of default, as an urbanized Londoner not really knowing what to do in the nature when it comes to my children, I had to really reflect on that and then say, okay, you know what? Let me let them be free. [00:08:28] Marion Atieno Osieyo: Wow, that's powerful. Thank you. So Agnes, you lead an organization called Global Child and Maternal Health. I'm curious to learn more about your journey and what led you to set up this organization. [00:08:45] Agnes Agyepong: Yeah, sure. I'm the founder of an organization, as you said, called Global Child and Maternal Health. But initially it started off as global black maternal health. I didn't start off to be a clean air advocate. I always, even sometimes, I always get shocked that you're still inviting me to come and speak. But I, as a mother, I've spoken openly just now about the fact that I'm a mother. I've got three children. When I was pregnant and then I had my third child, I experienced care that was woefully inadequate at the time I didn't know that black women at the time in the UK were five times more likely to die in pregnancy. I, these are not things that were in my radar whatsoever, but what I did know was I was treated really bad. And if it wasn't for the fact that it was my third child and it was my first child, I probably could have been severely harmed because if I had listened to their advice and I hadn't try to put my foot down and I say I did the best I could at that time 'cause I'm in labor, so there's not much more I could do. God knows what could have happened to me and my child. So that, I always say was a watershed moment for me because it changed the trajectory of my life. Yeah, I had such big indignation that I was so angry. I remember like I'd given birth to my child at two o'clock in the morning and within half an hour I was trying to put like eyeliner and put like a little turban on my head and make myself palatable. And I, I always share that story because it's like, as a black woman, I also felt at the time that. I've come in to give birth. When it was my first child wanted to get my nails done, pedicure, I tried to look cute. After the first labour pain, I said, you are ridiculous. You look cute. You anybody say Second child now? But by the time it's the third one. I'm in my auntie dress. Like I know I'm coming for la the word labour and I understood what that definition meant. Yeah. So I've come in and I really thought these people have really misread me. Maybe it's 'cause of the way I've presented myself and so forth when I've given birth to this baby. I wanna speak to the manager and I need to make sure I presented myself in a certain way. But I have to reflect back on that now. I'm just like how ridiculous that's what any woman should be made to feel that she has to look a certain way and because in the most, one of the most vulnerable, if not the most vulnerable time in her life. But then after I started investigating what happened to me, I started to get I started to advocate for myself and then for other women. I started to understand this whole bigger narrative around black maternal health. So that's how I fell into it. During that time, obviously, COVID so much that was going on and I realized that a lot of our conversations around black maternal health was centered with the experiences, like my experience of what was happening in the hospitals. But nobody was talking about the environmental factors that were contributing to black women entering into pregnancy with, higher incidences of poor health. And so that was the heart of it. For me, you can never tell me that's a genetic thing for black women, i'll lead you back to the science then if we talk about that. Where the oldest, the remains found? Yeah. If black women's bodies had any genetic default, none of us would be here. Yeah. Like a long time ago, we would've canceled ourselves out. So we know that it cannot be a genetic issue. Yeah. What are the systems, what are the environments? What are going on that black women are more likely to die? In pregnancy. And at the same time, I have a daughter who's asthmatic whilst I was pregnant with my third child, again, with the instant that I had a lot of things was happening to her around the air, that she was breathing around her deteriorating health and around me not being listened to, and then also me, then subsequently finding out. This was after she had been diagnosed with community acquired pneumonia, which at that time was one of the leading courses of death of children five years and under. I find out that I lived in the same borough as little Ella, who is wow. The child that a lot of your listeners will know and is the only person who's had air pollution at the cause of their death on their death certificate. So all of these things going on led me to do global black maternal health, but our work expanded into also S.E.N.D, so especially educational needs and disability. As our work evolved and developed, we then went on to do global child and maternal health, which is more reflective of our work, but obviously with a strong racial justice and equity lens. [00:12:59] Marion Atieno Osieyo: Wow. And how has your work been received? Like over time? [00:13:04] Agnes Agyepong: Yeah. To be honest, I feel like it's been received quite well from a, we need this perspective. And so a lot of your listeners, I'll give some context. What we did is, so we as a, as an organization, global Child and Maternal Health, we produce our own research research. We then of course try and implement what we can from our recommendations. And some of the research is about what we can do, and some of it is about what systems need to do and statutory bodies. Schools, no, no one person can solve all of these different issues. So in 2023, we produced a report called Black Child Clean Air. Which was about the experiences, the attitudes, and the behaviors of black women who were either pregnant or had a child five years and under. Around air pollution in London. The reason that was really important is because one, black Londoners are three times more likely to breathe illegal levels of air pollution, but also two, if we are then saying the most vulnerable of those black Londoners, which undoubtedly would be like pregnant women, children and mothers. If we are trying to see how we can support, we first of all need to find out what is their baseline understanding and awareness. We can't just be thinking about creating policies and doing to communities, which I feel like, is something that we do so much of. We might have the scientific evidence of why the issues are there, but if you don't translate that in a human way and work with communities to first of all understand where they're at, then it's gonna feel like you are doing to. And you're not doing with, and more importantly, you're not allowing communities to lead. So I felt like that was a missing piece that we didn't even understand. Okay. So what's the baseline knowledge of the, of this cohort? And it was really interesting because what we found is that women, when we surveyed black pregnant women they understood how air pollution impacted themselves. So that, let's say, I would say like 50, 50, 60% around approximately, but they, it went up to things like 80, 90% plus when we talked about how do we think air pollution affects them when they're pregnant and once baby's born, so you know that those kind of significant jumps. So that means that you you you and I think, in London there's was Les and there's, a lot of conversations around, air pollution is not good for you, even though still I feel like a hundred percent of people should know about that, right? And the fact that they're not the knowledge jumps up. Or it gets less. When they become pregnant or once a child once born is an alarm bell. [00:15:21] Marion Atieno Osieyo: Yeah. They were aware of the impacts of air pollution, but when it came to the impacts of air pollution on their pregnancies and their kids, they were less aware. Is that what you're saying? [00:15:32] Agnes Agyepong: They were less aware and it went up to 30% or something less aware. And the reason that's really important is because we know that toxic air and the particles go through the placenta into baby. We know that. We know that children or pregnant women who are exposed to high levels of air pollution, the children are three times more likely to be autistic. We know about like this, the epigenetic makeup that literally a baby's brain formation, self formation can be changed in utero. Whilst is growing up. So then it's really important if we saying that, you shouldn't smoke in pregnancy, you shouldn't drink alcohol in pregnancy, you shouldn't take drugs in pregnancy. Yeah. And. Even then putting that whole awareness to be like, but also the air that you breathe. And that's not just outdoors, it's also indoor mould and damp, gas, whereas toxic air, and we're not doing anything around that. Yeah. Knowing that those particles also impact baby, yeah. Has a very big problem. Yeah. Yeah. [00:16:30] Marion Atieno Osieyo: There's so much that you've touched on there, Agnes, and we're gonna unpack it because. I firstly encourage everybody to read the Black Child Clean Air Report because firstly, it was so well written. I really wanna emphasize, because sometimes you have policy reports that come out that genuinely have such important information, but they're so dense and you're just like. If me, with the privilege of having a postgraduate degree, I'm struggling to process how can someone who has lived experience of this, but maybe they're not the same level of like access to education, be able to process this. But I found your reports so accessible to read and I love, you are welcome. What you said earlier about you weren't just getting data, like scientific data that was about the black women you were speaking to, but you were actually allowing them to speak, and to share their voice and to share their perspective. And also in the report you like asked the women, how has your behavior changed as a result of like your awareness of air pollution? And some people said, they would take back route, instead of the main streets or they would walk more or other things like this, and. I just found that blend of having lived experience, centered in a report as well as the data that can help inform, like policy recommendations, so powerful. So I really want to like really recognize that and the fact that it's the first of its kind in the uk, like genuinely speaking with black women who are pregnant, were mothers who were most affected by air pollution about their experiences and like genuinely reaching out to them. You had different methods of reaching out to women that I felt was like how research should be done. [00:18:22] Agnes Agyepong: Thank you. Thank you. I have to a shout out to my girls. Yeah. Dr. Michelle Peter and Reese Wheeler again, who also authored the report team effort. Yeah. Like I don't come from a research background. And actually when I started to embark on this journey, our motto is nothing about us without us. And about putting research back into the hands of black communities as leaders and change agents. And it was a very ambitious target because I don't have a research, now I'm doing a PhD. By the time when I started this, which was only four or five years ago, I didn't have any research experience whatsoever. But I had a belief, if not me, then who? And I say that because a, I used to say to a team and like the team that assembled, if I don't understand it. Yeah. Nobody will understand it. Yeah. You need to break it down to me because I'm not, I don't come from that academia space. Yeah. But also two, and I think you really hit on a really important point there. It's so dense how research is often written and constructed and in a way that's an epistemic injustice. It's a, it's an injustice because what it does is it keeps knowledge in an echo chamber of people that understand that language, and the people that understand that language are speaking to the people that understand that language, and it stays there. And very rarely does it come out then into the community. And our philosophy is that, again, we're not discarding science, we're not saying that, okay, as an epistemic injustice, scientific and positivist type data shouldn't be used, but it has to be used in tandem with lived experience. Otherwise it's not useful. Then in short, it becomes okay, you now know that okay, great. You know that. Turn that knowledge into things that are actionable and into things that communities can now find it useful for themselves. How are you going to now do that? [00:20:09] Marion Atieno Osieyo: That's really powerful. And, when you say epistemic justice, what do you mean by that? [00:20:15] Agnes Agyepong: Epistemic injustice is a study of knowledge and how knowledge is constructed, right? And so epistemic injustice means, it basically means that you are putting who faith, what knowledge is important versus. What's not. So what we know is the current, in the current like landscape, when we're looking at research, we know that scientific data, heavy knowledge is, it's preferred or seen as more robust than lived experience than qualitative data and so forth. And that's a hierarchy of knowledge. Yeah. And in a way that does oftentimes create an epistemic injustice. So a knowledge injustice on whose voices they matter as black people as for us that come from the diaspora or indigenous communities. For us, it even more epistemic injustice or more. I don't wanna even use these big terminologies in a way, but it's a more of a, an injustice about our knowledge because we know that traditionally our knowledge has been more, or oral history. My background is Ghanaian. If you think about Anantse, I know the story of Anantse, not because a book told me, but that's the story that my mom would've told me, and her grandma would've told her. And her grandma and I know that a lot of the women in my maternal line were not necessarily literate in that kind of way, but they knew the story Anantse. But when it gets to the stage, when, now, if it's not in a book and if it's not data heavy, it's not seen as important. That kind of oral tradition. Yeah. Then is disregarded. And I'm using that analogy to now, look at that qualitative data. What happens then is when people are usually bringing their kind of lived experience and then knowledge and so forth oh, that's a one off. Or, it's not as robust because people, it doesn't fit into those kind of fine lines. Yeah. And so then there's usually a preference then for like kind of mass data sets and looking at these patterns and so forth. Again, I'm not disregarding that completely, but I'm just saying on its own, it doesn't say the true story. And I'll give an analogy to this. I think it was last year or the year before, there was this story that went viral on social media and this story, and apologies for, it's a lady who, was narrating the story if I butcher some parts of it, yeah. Just bear with me. I'm trying my best to get it right. Yeah. But what had happened was there was this one black lady, and she was working in a mental health hospital in America. Yeah. And her colleague came up to a white colleague and said, look. The lady's deteriorating here. She's really deteriorating. And the black lady, she was the only black staff. I don't know if she was the only black staff in the facility, but definitely the only one that was on call that day. The black lady kept on interrogating her, and then she was like what do you mean? And she was like she, she was banging her head like this. And any black woman bang the head like this, you're itching your head. Yeah. That's what you do. You're itching your head. You can imagine if he's in a hospital. Yeah. Places as a mental health institution, no one had taken out her weave. Brain underneath might be like, they have grown this long. Yeah. But I use that story always as an analogy to talk about why data on its own without lived experience. Yeah. And qualitative data can actually be quite harmful. [00:23:17] Marion Atieno Osieyo: We've spoken before about like research being the first like you were saying, research that's done in a just way is like the first step towards like clean air justice, because when you have meaningful information, meaningful data, then you can actually think of solutions which work. Another element that I wanted to discuss with you is one about inequality, because that has come up not just in terms of the unequal impacts of air pollution in London and how that disproportionately affects, black communities, ethnic minoritized communities, and working class communities, but also it's come up in the solutions, right? So I'm not gonna name any solutions here, but some solutions. Some solutions that have been developed in response to addressing air pollution in London have also then ended up having negative impact on certain communities, even more and so I wanted to like maybe ask you how inequality intersects with air pollution, because yes, we all breathe the air. If you're living in London, you are exposed to a certain level of like air pollution, right? That's the reality. But how does inequality then intersect with this and how does that then lead to the impacts that we're seeing now in terms of unequal impacts for certain groups in London? [00:24:47] Agnes Agyepong: So I think there's two parts to the question. So one I'm really glad that you hear about the research part and why that's important. I always say it's interesting 'cause I run a research led organization and I don't really like research. Yeah. What the irony, should I be saying that out loud? This is gonna come back to haunt me, but I say that because I feel that. The research world as it stands right now is actually the battleground for all the work that we're talking about when we're talking about dismantling systemic injustices, the de colonizing data and so forth. And actually in the news, in the media, when we talk about like we need to break down barriers, we don't really articulate that well enough that actually it all starts to do research. Yeah. And I say that because funding. Policy. Every single thing that we want to do within a kind of, whether it's a democratic or kind of a, the way that we live with governments and so forth, has to be based on the evidence, right? So then it's who's collecting those evidence? Who's evidence? What is being recorded, what is not being recorded? Whose voices are being centered, whose voice are not being centered and so forth. And so actually research world. Yeah. That's where for me, and that's why we do what we do. That's the battleground. Yeah. That is the battleground. And I don't think we talk about that enough. And then I think as a result of that, then that then mixing to the injustices of. Why there will be unequal consequences even though we're all living in London. So you didn't say, but I'll give an example of a policy that I think is, but I'll say it below, traffic neighborhoods or the ltms. And I say this because again, I live in southeast London. Yeah. I live on a main artery. Yeah. And so what that means is when traffic is being diverted onto certain areas, where do you think those areas are? Do you think they're in the kind of more affluent areas, even if they're in a de deprived, quote unquote neighborhood? Yeah, they're definitely not. Yeah, so what happens is traffic is often then pushed into areas where the poor communities in those boroughs, in those areas can live and breathe. I see that happening where I live. I'm not that far from areas that are really green and really leafy and so forth, but that's not my experience genuinely when I'm on the school run, and I don't need data to tell me that. I don't care if you come and tell me, oh, the have cut this, that, and the other. I'm telling you, when I go on the school run and when I'm doing this is what I see. This is what I breathe. And so when you are doing a policy that only. On the outside, yes. It might look like, okay, this is cutting down emissions, or this is saving.dot. But you have to look at what then the unintended consequences. Yeah. For people who are from, as you said, often minoritized communities, working class communities. And then in those, it's usually the mothers and the children. And these are just the things that you have to look at. And so that's the kind of a prime example. Then we've gotta think about them. What's the health implications then for these communities? Because a lot of the time we talk about air pollution, we talk about climate, we talk about heat, we talk about flood and so forth, right? But if I don't understand how that then directly translates into my health. Yeah. Or that of my family that leads has become other words for me to decode alongside so many other words I have to decode. But if you're giving me more things to decode, right? It's not that I don't care about these issues, it's just that I'm already overwhelmed with life. Yeah. Again, that becomes an injustice on who can actually have the capacity to even understand these unintended consequences and really then assess these issues and then make the correlation, I can talk about this stuff today. Yeah it becomes an injustice and that's why we, I talked about the kind of key term in the research world is epistemic injustice. But the kind of the key terminology. Just for us as just average people without academic language is it really becomes a liberty. Like they don't need to say it's a natural liberty that we then end up bearing the brunt disproportionately for policies that will maybe have a, an overall better effect for community, but not mine. [00:29:06] Marion Atieno Osieyo: One of the things that I have really appreciated about, actually there's two things about the Your Work. One is the report, the other one is the Annual Black Child Clean Air Conference, which we'll talk about in a minute. In your report, you asked the women about indoor and outdoor air pollution. There's a lot of focus on outdoor air pollution, rightly so but it's also important to talk about indoor air pollution because a lot of us spend most of our time indoors and also the other like lesser known causes of air pollution in the home that don't get as much light, if that makes sense. Or because we need them. It's like a non-negotiable. So one example is like gas and gas cookers, right? If you have a gas cooker in your home. You need to cook, right? It's not something that is like a negotiable, whereas something like, which I'm guilty of burning incense. It's good for my spiritual aura, but I can live without burning incense, I really appreciated this also because on a serious note, there are other determinants of indoor air pollution like damp and mold, which has come up in conversations around the right to decent housing, especially in the uk. And so I see this conversation around clean air, touching on so many different points. It's an environmental issue, it's a climate issue. It's a decent housing issue. It's a public health issue. It's an animal rights issue, right? Because if you have animals and the soil as well taking in that air, that whole also has impacts on our living environment. And so it's the need of. To bring together different knowledge communities, different departments, policy departments together is what's going to be most effective in like addressing like air pollution in its entirety. And it's one of the reasons why I really appreciate the conference that you hold every year. So I'd love for you to tell like our listeners more about the annual conference. And I know you had one last month. What are the key themes coming up at the moment around addressing air pollution in the uk? [00:31:13] Agnes Agyepong: I think one, you gave the answer. It's about bringing together different knowledge communities, and it fits into what I said earlier on about the knowledge injustice, about whose knowledge matters and whose knowledge doesn't. If we don't have different knowledge communities around the table, right? We're creating an injustice to them. Yeah. So yes, when we do our research and we do our report, I would say the report is more for the industry. Yeah. My mom growing up I come from a Ghanaian background, but I don't wanna stereotype Ghanaians. However, as women, we are mostly meant to there's a kind of a stereotype of us, me needing to be a little bit more calmer and so forth. And I grew up I believe, I feel I came, I was completely different to what I'm meant to be. It's like, where did this. I speak up, I'm out. My mom was like, you need to be a lawyer. You are always talking. The report I always say is like me talking and being like, I'm not the only one saying it. That's why I want to have that research and that data, because I don't want you to minimize the things that I'm saying. I only knew I needed my evidence base to be able to talk. So that's why we have the report. But the conference now. And that fits into, again, when we're talking about the knowledge and the communities, that now is that all our oral conversations, the bit I was talking about earlier about how community receive information. And that's not to say that we are not researchers. My head of research is a black woman, my directors and so forth, unapologetically, they're black women are very important that a majority of my team do come from the same communities that we are trying to address. Yeah. So that we can bring in these different lenses. So that's not to say that we can't understand positivist scientific type data. Not only can we understand, we can lead on that. Yeah. I wanna put that there. But also in, in our traditions and I'm talking about ancestry now. I'm not even talking about just like now our traditions pre colonialism, right? Our traditions that shape. As first of all, a diasporic community in the uk and also in our indigenous cultures is oral history. We like to be able to get together and to be able to commune and communicate and fellowship and decode information by listening and speaking. We like that, that we gather, whether it's through religion, whether it's through spiritual, whether it's, and even in America, they'll be like, oh, you invited to the cookout, or You are not invited to the cookout, a podcast. Yeah, exactly. A podcast. It's because of the kind of speaking part of our conference is that aspect. It's making sure that we're honoring. It all the different knowledge, ways that knowledge is not just constructed, but also decoded. And so our annual black child clean air conference, we bring together, yes, we have politicians in the room. We have together people that are from the healthcare sector, people that are from the education sector, people that are from transportation. We have social commentators, but we have community, right? We have people that. Traditionally do not appear to be clean air advocates. And that's really important to me because I was thinking, how did me Agnes, become a clean air advocate? Because I never, it was not even on my, if somebody had given me a leaflet about 10 years ago, I would've been like, but I feel like that's the power. How do we convert people like me who traditionally didn't really see themselves at one with nature, that wasn't really our kind of way into it. How do we let them understand that you are exactly number one, the person that should be interested in this more, right? Do that by bringing together the community give, bringing together people who traditionally may not feel like this is about them, but then when they come in, they're like, not only is this about me, this is my story. Yeah. And this year our theme was actually about indoor air pollution. When we talk about pollution, and we're talking about it particularly in communities that they will say, quote unquote, are deprived, and I say quote unquote, because I live in one of those quote unquote deprived communities. And actually these, some of the communities are some of the best communities, I would say in London. To use our colloquial, these are vibey multicultural communities. There's so much energy and so much love, right? In these communities when we're then looking and talking about. Just these issues of air pollution and so forth. We need to make sure we've got those communities that are in the room and that they're centered, and I feel like that is what our conference is all about. And then outside of that conference, also in disseminating information because we don't wanna just be once a year that we're talking about. [00:35:29] Marion Atieno Osieyo: Wow. Thank you so much. I'm aware that there could be someone who is watching this episode right now who is a pregnant, who has young children and is concerned about the impacts of air pollution on their health and their baby's health. What are some of the kind of key recommendations you can make to them right now at this stage? [00:35:53] Agnes Agyepong: That's really important? I think first of all. It's the knowledge about where possible educating themselves on some of these different issues. Yesterday I was with somebody who isn't pregnant but does, has have young children, and they were saying something like, oh, in the nighttime, for some reason, every time they put their daughter to bed, that's when all of a sudden has sinuses flare and so forth, and in the night. And it was when, just in, in passing. And I said, oh, it's interesting because at the moment there's a study that's happening right now, it's currently underway. It's part of the well home project that's happening at the moment. These are not their finalized results, but what they're finding is that in the house, the air pollution, like indoor air pollution, so whether that's food, gas, cooking and so forth, it stays in the children's room. And it lingers there longer than any other room in the house. And that's typically what happens is families come home from work. They typically cook. Yeah. And everything else that's going on, they send the children to bed, usually earlier than the adults would go to bed and they close the door and the children go to sleep. Whereas for the adults, because they're still walking around and go in and out, all of that, whatever's being built up in their now home environment, has more of a chance to be ventilated out. But for the children, they're still there. And so far preliminary studies are showing that. So those are the kind of things that are I don't want people to feel like we don't have any agency, we're just at home, we can't do anything. Little things like that. Thinking about okay, after dinner time and so forth, how can I make sure that all the rooms are ventilated properly and, opening the windows where they can and so forth. I think other things around are speaking to your doctors. Increasingly now there's lots more training that is happening with kind of GPS and healthcare professionals around speaking to communities around air pollution and so forth. So actually, speaking to a community, because I feel like, again, a big injustice is that if I've got migraines, reoccurring migraines, or my child's having reoccurring migraines, reoccurring sinus problems, skin issues and so forth, I might go to the doctors and say, I feel my child's got eczema. My child's having sinuses. I will not say, do you think this is an air pollution issue? And I'm just saying that as a mom. Yeah. Many parents wouldn't know to even. Bring that. Yeah. So I think that's a part. And also speaking to your mps, so I was speaking, I was at a co an event yesterday in in Parliament and it was an MP there and she was like, no, she doesn't get one single letter about air pollution. Yeah, and a single letter about it. When she's looking at what she's prioritizing, because she has to represent the local community. She doesn't really have a strong case to say, this is why she's focusing all of her energy on air pollution, whether that's indoor or outdoor, and not X, Y, and Z. She doesn't have a strong case. Yeah. So again, things that you can do is like writing to your mps and making sure this is based, this is for your listeners that are based in the uk and I'll probably say within America and so forth. But even if you're based, in, outside of the Western kind of hemisphere. Do not think that you, your voice does not matter. Yeah. Like social media, finding other kind of communities and so forth that you can speak to and kind of decode. We live in a global village now. I think that's really important and where it is safe to do so as well, speaking to your kind of elected representatives as well. [00:39:13] Marion Atieno Osieyo: Yeah. That's really powerful. Thank you so much. And. I know in the UK at the moment, we have Ella's Law, which has been reintroduced into parliament, and that law is named after Ella, Roberta the girl who you are speaking about who died from air pollution at the age of nine. And this law is aimed at, making clean air a human right in the uk and really just making sure the UK government is accountable for like doing its best to enable clean air in the uk. So I think even stuff like that, like bringing that to your MP and saying, this is going through parliament. What are you doing to make sure that it's this resolution is passed? Those kinds of things do make a difference in the long run because they're going to be about changing legislation and changing law. [00:40:01] Agnes Agyepong: No, I'm just so glad you brought that up because Ella's law is fundamental, and even when you say that oh, Ella's Law, it's about making sure that kle is a human right. I like wince, and I wince because it's 2025 and we're talking about clean air being a human right. Absolutely. Do you know how wild, do you know how wild that is? Like absolutely. We know about water and sanitation and so forth. We wouldn't even be talking about this. Yeah. Like water. Water should be right. But we 2025 and we are trying to make sure that we have laws that are protected so that people can breathe in clean air that is not going to be detrimental to their health. But then let's move forward further than that. And I hate talking about things in such a pedantic, monetary way, but sometimes that's the only way that politicians also listen is also this, the strain on our national health services. We know that in a lot of deprived communities we see things like an increase in like ninefold of children who are having to be admitted into A&E because of respiratory health issues, right? And. Hostile that has on a national health service, we know that obviously neurodivergent children who have additional sensory issues and so forth when they're breathing in this toxic air that's gonna have a different a sensory relationship to them, which increases the incidence of sensory meltdowns and their ability to then be able to engage into the curriculum and so forth. In the UK right now where we are being cut back on winter fuel allowances and then, and all of these other different aspects in the US where we see that there's massive cuts. And so actually globally we see that there's massive cuts. There's not money circulating around that. Can we even afford the costs of toxic air on our communities? And then the cost has monitor really on our health systems, but also the cost. We can't actually afford it. [00:42:00] Marion Atieno Osieyo: Absolutely. Absolutely. And it's the deaths, the number of deaths that are being caused by air pollution, but also the lifelong health issues which you've raised. It's lifelong, no one can afford to live [00:42:12] Agnes Agyepong: In the borough that I live, there's something like a 10 year life expectancy. And for people that are not familiar with the way that the UK works, we have like different like towns and neighborhoods within boroughs we can have 10, 15, whatever, but sometimes it's literally with, if there's no traffic, like 10 minutes to be able to drive from one end of to another end. Yeah. And it's like sometimes 10 years, 15 years life expectancy in an area that you can drive through in 10 years. But then again, what we are looking at as well is healthy life experience. So yes, in the uk and in the US actually, I think even globally, we are living longer. Yeah. But how much of that length of time is actually healthy length? Yeah. So yes, we're living longer but we are going to be spending an increasingly amount of our time thicker. Yeah. As a result of multitude of different factors, but toxic air being a result, when we're thinking of things like dementia, when we're thinking about heart conditions and so forth. And I know for one, for me, I want to live along where I wanna be able to see my children grow, and I wanna be able to help 'em be valued. But I wanna be running alongside my grandchildren. So when we're talking about our wellbeing and living and having an. Embodied experience as we go into old age toxic air and clean air has to be part of that conversation. When I entered into this work and I said it at the beginning, it was through my own trauma. It was through my own negative experiences around maternal health. And so I entered it into, with a fight. I ended it with my fight. Like I was, I had so much indignation and I just couldn't believe it was happening to me. But now I would say my son was born in 2018, it's 2025 now. I'm like, no, I don't have to be fighting every single second. I am allowed to have joy. [00:44:05] Marion Atieno Osieyo: Thank you so much, Agnes. The last question I have, Agnes, how can we support you and support your work? [00:44:12] Agnes Agyepong: So I think there's a few things. I think one, please come and follow us. That's something that you can do for free. You can follow us on Instagram. So that's Global Child and Maternal Health. Find us on LinkedIn as well. Global Child and Maternal Health. You can find me everywhere. LinkedIn, Instagram if there's any kind of like funders and so forth out there. This is not even just a cry for me to say. Fund me and support me, right? But it's about, as an industry for the philanthropists supporting work that is rooted in really authentically engaging communities. I feel like at the moment there is a lot of lip service around, oh, we wanna address inequalities and inequities. But if anybody doesn't audit on actually, where does the funding go? When we're talking about that, because it's all good saying we wanna address inequalities, we wanna talk to the community. Okay, so how are you supporting those that are already on the ground to be able to do that? You'll find that actually the conversations don't match the actual funding and support. So I would say that yeah, for philanthropic organizations do their own kind of. The view on that and see actually how can they support, and that could be through podcasts, like the work that you are doing. It could be through the work that we are doing where we are actually speaking directly to community through research. If your multitude, I'm not saying my way is just the only way or the right way. I'm saying find the different pockets because different communities are gonna listen to different things and make sure that you. Also supporting those groups to be able to sustain themselves and not just with 12 months. Don't give us anxiety when you're thinking about supporting us. I know, like I, I probably talking too long about this is really important if you're listening to this point. Listen for a few more seconds. Yeah. When you give us, and again, I don't want to come from a place of ingratitude and so forth, but this is really a place about, if we're talking about systemic injustice, if we're talking about systemic inequalities and readdressing that we're talking about also from a place of, I don't wanna talk from a place of joy, but just from a place of a regulated nervous system. Yeah. Then we need to be able to plan. Yeah, we need to be able to say, okay, you know what? And also we need to be able to have risk. And I feel like there's always this expectation on black and minoritized, indigenous, less communities, that from the get go, we are gonna do this and we're gonna have to do perfectly. And actually when we then have project funding that's only six months or 12, basically short term project funding, we are not able to actually be experiential and say, okay, let's test things out with the community. Let's then look at the learning from that and take that learning into something that now will have a long-term benefit to the community even after funding has gone. Yeah, so actually project based funding that is short term and it's not rooted in salaries and building up the capacity of communities to stand on their own, actually. Then in a way, it creates a kind of a dependency. [00:46:57] Marion Atieno Osieyo: Wow, this has been so powerful. Thank you so much Agnes. I'm really grateful for the conversation that we've had today and I've honestly been so engaged and like I'm still learning just by listening to you today. And I know that this conversation is going to really impact a lot of people and really encouraged and to start looking about ways to be more actively engaged in conversations and action around air pollution in their communities. And personally, just to say since we first met two years ago, the conversation around air pollution in black communities has snowballed, and that is partly thanks to leaders like you and community organizations who are really mobilising conversations around this in an accessible way and in a way that's about genuine conversation and not just going to communities to get stuff and come out. So I really wanna thank you and I look forward to seeing you again. [00:47:55] Agnes Agyepong: Hopefully I look forward to seeing you in Bali. Yes, you there? And invite me to Bali. Okay. You'll see me soon. [00:48:02] Marion Atieno Osieyo: You'll. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining today's episode of Black Earth Podcast. I hope that you are inspired and moved and changed by the conversation that we had today. This season of Black Earth Podcast is made possible because I have an amazing team around me. So firstly, thank you to our funding partner, Synchronicity Earth. Thank you to our podcast production team at Content is Queen. Thank you to our impact producer Caz Watson, and thank you to the amazing visual design artist, Shanice Da Costa. I would love to hear your thoughts on the conversation today because you, my friend. Are a very important part of this conversation. You matter and your voice matters, so make sure you're connected with us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok at Black Earth Podcast. And we also have a newsletter called Tender Revolutions, where we share more thoughts, more insights on all things Earth Care, as well as live opportunities from our growing network of supporters and organizations. Don't forget to subscribe to our podcast. Wherever you listen to your favorite podcast, so you can get the latest episode as soon as it goes live. In the meantime, be well. Get out in nature and get right with Mother Nature. Peace.