In the Developing World, a Renaissance in Christian Higher Education

By Rick Ostrander. My plane touches down just before midnight at Entebbe airport, by the shores of Lake Victoria, on a warm humid evening in East Africa. I walk through a drab, tired-looking terminal and out to a waiting vehicle in a dimly lit parking lot. I have arrived in Kampala, Uganda, for a four-day visit to Uganda Christian University and a front-row seat to a global revolution in higher education.
As the economies of the developing world have grown, they have created a nearly insatiable demand for higher education, especially in the Global South. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, the number of university students has risen from 800,000 in 1985 to three million in 2002. A significant footnote to this growth has been the rapid expansion of Christian higher education in the developing world. Of the nearly 600 Christian universities outside the United States and Canada, 30 percent were started since 1980. Since 1990, 138 new Christian universities have been started, 46 of them in Africa. Read more...