Lung health in Africa across the life course Almost half of the world's population, including 700 million people in Africa, relies on biomass fuels (animal dung, crop residues, wood) for their everyday fuel-energy requirements. These fuels are typically burned in open fires, often indoors, that emit smoke into the household environment and lead to high levels of household air pollution. Women and children, especially young children, experience high exposures to air pollution in the home; this has been linked to a range of adverse health outcomes including non communicable lung diseases like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and lung cancer in adults and asthma in children. It is now recognised that household air pollution from biomass smoke is the third leading cause of global disability and death with 4 million deaths attributed to this exposure annually. This burden, much of which is represented by non-communicable respiratory disease, falls hardest on poor populations around the world and in countries in sub-Saharan Africa in particular.  To build the foundations for work to tackle this issue we have bought together a network of investigators from ten African countries (Cameroon, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, South Africa, Sudan, The Gambia and Uganda) underpinned by support from the Pan African Thoracic Society (PATS), American Thoracic Society (ATS) Methods in Epidemiologic, Clinical and Operations Research (MECOR) programme, MRC BREATHE-Africa partnership, Malawi Liverpool Wellcome Trust (MLW), Burden of Obstructive Lung Disease (BOLD) Centre, Spirometry Training Services Africa, Global Asthma Network (GAN), and Collaboration for Applied Health Research and Delivery (CAHRD). This proposal offers an unprecedented opportunity to create a multi-site multi-disciplinary pan-African platform for clinical, epidemiological and applied health research underpinned by regional and international collaborative research and delivery networks that will allow us to conduct research into the causes, prevention and treatment of non-communicable respiratory disease across the life course. By addressing a major cause of morbidity and mortality across the life course of children and adults living in low or middle-income countries in Africa the proposal is fully aligned with the overall principle of Official Development Assistance (ODA) to promote welfare of developing countries.   Within the two years of this foundations-building grant we will work hard to create a thriving partnership whilst delivering on two specific research aims: to 1) develop and share methodology for the measurement of non-communicable respiratory disease exposures and outcomes tailored to the challenges of conducting research in resource-constrained African environments and 2) use this methodology to generate and share high quality preliminary data from multiple African sites. The Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) supports cutting-edge research to address challenges faced by developing countries. The fund addresses the UN sustainable development goals. It aims to maximise the impact of research and innovation to improve lives and opportunity in the developing world.