Nelson Makanda wants to train 200,000 pastors to meet Africa’s Evangelical boom

By Leonardo Blair, Senior Reporter Sunday, October 05, 2025

NEW YORK — On a wet Thursday in September, the Rev. Nelson Makanda was busy appealing to the United States President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief as world leaders talked politics and diplomacy at the United Nations General Assembly.

Since U.S. President George W. Bush started PEPFAR in 2003, it has been managed by the U.S. Department of State’s Office of the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator and Health Diplomacy. The program has invested more than $100 billion in the global HIV/AIDS response, reportedly “saving 25 million lives, preventing millions of HIV infections, and supporting several countries to achieve HIV epidemic control,” according to the program’s website.

When Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that a significant majority of programs funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development would be canceled in March, Makanda, a former pastor-turned-vice chancellor of Africa International University in Nairobi, said it was devastating.

America is the single largest funder of HIV/AIDs programs in Kenya, and most of those funds came from USAID through PEPFAR, which has been frozen. Without the assistance, most people with HIV/AIDS in Kenya, where nearly 50% of the population lives on less than $3 a day, can't afford treatment.

In 2023, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that about 4.3% or some 2.4 million people in Kenya’s 55.3 million population between the ages of 15 and 49 were living with HIV. That’s double the number of infected people in the United States, despite a significantly larger population of over 333 million.  

When Rubio made his March announcement about the dismantling of USAID, Makanda says the impact was felt almost immediately in Kenya.

“You find young people, you find children, you find teenagers, you find mothers, who can no longer access their medical care because of the withdrawal of that fund. And so we were trying to make an appeal to PEPFAR, to expedite in releasing the funds that are available,” Makanda, who also has an HIV-infected adopted son impacted by the dismantling of USAID, told CP.

“Once the announcement was made, the staffers that were working on different projects were given notice and were told, ‘you have no jobs.’ Some of them were nurses working in clinics. Some of them were pharmacists working in hospitals. Some of them were caregivers that were receiving this funding,” he said.

“So in March, people go to their clinics, go to their hospitals and they find places are closed. There's nobody to do their tests so that they could check their CD4 count. There's nobody to dispense the medicines and products. There's nobody to do testing and counseling. It's been horrendous.”

But Makanda’s flight to New York City wasn’t just about appealing for the release of PEPFAR funds to help Kenya fight HIV/AIDS. He had come to learn how to better serve Kenya with the Gospel by immersing himself in a three-day Christian leadership conference at The Brooklyn Tabernacle, billed as The Calling.

“I find that this gives me an opportunity to sit, to reflect, and be ministered to,” he said of the conference a day before it would begin on Sept. 26.

The vice chancellor of Africa International University has been serving his country and the continent of Africa with the Gospel for decades.

Prior to his latest role in academia, Makanda was a pastor and associate pastor at Nairobi Baptist Church. He also served as the deputy general secretary for the National Council of Churches in Kenya. That umbrella organization represents more than 30 different Protestant denominations across Kenya with some 30 million members. Makanda was also the general secretary of the Evangelical Alliance of Kenya, representing an additional 12 to 15 million people.

In Africa, Makanda explains, thanks to a variety of factors, including the work of U.S. missionaries on the continent, Evangelicalism has been booming.

Data published by Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary shows that the number of Evangelicals increased globally from 112 million in 1970 to 386 million in 2020. The growth of Evangelicals in Africa, however, has been outstanding. In 1900, only 1.7% of Africa’s population was Evangelical, but it swelled to 42% by 2020. Researchers say if the trend continues, Africans will make up more than half of Evangelicals globally by 2050.

Pew Research data also shows that in 2020, almost 700 million people in sub-Saharan Africa identified as Christian, making them the largest religious group.

“The Gospel as preached by Evangelicals provides hope to the poor, suffering, struggling and hopeful growing population of Africa,” Makanda explained when asked what was causing the explosion.

“As people are transitioning from the African traditional religion and that context, and beginning to experience Christian faith and modern life, but yet still trapped in sickness, trapped in poverty, trapped in illiteracy and trapped with issues of life. The gospel as preached by Evangelicals provides great hope,” he said.

As birthrates fall in the developed world, Africa, buoyed by its status of having the world’s youngest population with a median age of 19, is expected to double its population and reach 2.5 billion.

And as more and more people are being reached by the Gospel, Makanda believes the blessing of youth on the continent will keep fueling the number of Evangelicals on the continent.

“So this beautiful population rising up, it's a phenomenon that is contributing to the growth of the numbers of Evangelicals. And so, you might perhaps see this in another 10, 15 years. ... We will most likely be hitting another 400 million, 450 million,” Makanda told CP. “I think it's a combination of all those factors, growing population, the social economy, political context in Africa and perhaps great missionary activity from the American people.”

The boom needs trained pastors, says Makanda, but their isn’t enough of them to meet the demand. That is why AIU has launched a partnership with the Church Transformation Network with a goal of training 200,000 pastors in Africa over the next five years. CTN is a California-based nonprofit dedicated to training strategic leaders and pastors in biblical knowledge, led by Jerry Rueb, the lead pastor of Cornerstone Church in Long Beach.

The AIU vice chancellor explained that the school’s partnership with CTN will accredit a once-informal arrangement that provides training administered in a peer-to-peer setting.

“I am hoping that in the next five years, African International University is going to train and certify at least 200,000 pastors,” Makanda told CP.

Some reports suggest that as much as 95% of the world’s pastors have no formal training, and Makanda says the statistic holds true in Africa. The lack of professional credentials in some countries on the continent, like Rwanda, has also hampered the ability of pastors to preach.

In 2018, the Rwandan government made it a requirement that leaders of faith-based organizations in that country have at least a bachelor’s degree in theology or face the shuttering of their churches. Last year alone, thousands of churches were closed for failing to meet that requirement.

“Before I traveled here (New York) …, I spent my weekend in Rwanda. In Rwanda, 9,000 churches were closed last year by the government,” Makanda said.

When asked if Makanda’s goal to train and certify 200,000 pastors in Africa in the next five years is realistic, Rueb told CP in an interview that he has already reached more than 25% of that target.

“Yes,” Rueb said without hesitation.

“It's the most unusual, unwritten, unknown story because already what God is doing is a movement, and it's not the typical, ‘Oh, here goes another missionary or a mission organization,” Rueb revealed. “We already have 65,000 [pastors] right now in training in Africa, and also in Thailand and India.”

He said he recently returned from a five-week trip in Africa, where his organization visited five different major cities and met with leaders from 21 countries on the continent.

“We have a memorandum of understanding with the Africa Evangelical Alliance, which is the largest umbrella of Evangelicals on the continent, they oversee 51 nations. So, what Makanda actually, in Kenya, has experienced, is we started, first of all in Ethiopia, with 10,000 pastors. It ended up being over 13,000 that we graduated a year and a half ago,” Rueb explained.

In August, Rueb said he gave the keynote address at a graduation ceremony for 7,000 pastors from the program in the Anglican Church in Uganda.

Over the last decade, CP has reported on multiple stories of pastors in Africa directing their congregants to engage in unorthodox and dangerous behavior like eating grass or drinking poison to show their faith.

Both Makanda and Rueb agree that this is one of the problems that formal training is expected to address and what countries like Rwanda are trying to avoid when they set standards of practice for pastors.

“One of the problems in Africa, anywhere where the Gospel goes and is so readily received, is that false teachers, just like the first century, much in the New Testament was written really by Paul the apostle, and John, about Gnosticism and other ... 'Christian' cults and false religions, and false doctrines,” Rueb told CP. “So governments have been alerted.”

Makanda says AIU has been subsidizing a lot of the training of pastors in Africa with help from partners like Samaritan’s Purse, World Vision and American churches, but there is still a great need for support. Rueb, who is trusting God to continue to fund the work with AIU as it progresses, believes that Makanda will likely exceed his goal of training 200,000 pastors in the next five years.

“When Makanda says 200,000 pastors in five years, it's no joke. It's for real, and we're actually seeing in the next decade, it could be as high as a million,” Rueb said. “It's possible if we have the proper resourcing, because the need is there and a desire.”