African Mission Healthcare
Legal name: African Mission Healthcare Foundation · EIN 27-3663856
African Mission Healthcare does not run hospitals. It funds hospitals other Christians already run — Kijabe in Kenya, Mbingo in Cameroon, Bongolo in Gabon, Gidel in the Nuba Mountains and about a dozen more — by paying for named surgeries through its Surgical Access for Everyone (SAFE) programme, buying equipment and building capacity, and funding the training of African clinicians. It was founded in 2010 by Dr Jon Fielder, an internist who moved to Kenya in 2002, and Mark Gerson, who funded him.
Burundi · Cameroon · Ethiopia · Gabon · Kenya · Liberia · Malawi · South Sudan · Sudan · Tanzania · Uganda
We pulled the spending and outcome counts out of the ministry’s audited statements or annual report ourselves and did the division in public.
Your gift
9 gifts of $50 cover one surgery sponsored through the SAFE programme. Yours is 12% of one.
The division
- per surgery sponsored through the SAFE programme
- $426
Only the spending on this program line is counted. This is the one division on this site where a ministry’s advertised price and its own tax filing agree, and it is worth saying why we built it this way. Both halves come out of the same 2025 Form 990: Part III reports $1,404,561 for the SAFE surgical sponsorship programme, and Schedule O reports the 3,294 surgeries that programme sponsored. We deliberately do not divide the whole $11,660,370 programme budget by the 5,942 surgeries the highlights book leads with, which reads $1,962 and would print as 4.6 times the advertised price — because 96% of that budget is grants to hospitals with their own buildings, their own surgeons and their own donors, so the gap between the two figures is the hospital’s subsidy rather than an overstatement by the funder. Three things still make $426 a ceiling and not a price. SAFE’s $1,404,561 also sponsored 432 normal deliveries at about $30 each, charged here to the surgeries, which overstates by roughly 1%. Both numbers come from a Form 990 rather than from audited statements, which this ministry does not make downloadable. And a sponsorship payment is not the cost of an operation: the theatre, the sterilising equipment and the surgeon’s training were paid for by somebody else, often decades ago, and nothing published says what a surgery at these hospitals actually costs.
Other defensible denominators
- $1,962 each, dividing by all 5,942 surgeries counted at partner hospitals, against all programme spending — About $1,962, and the pairing the ministry’s own highlights book invites. It charges every grant dollar to the surgeries alone, when the same budget also paid for 384,679 clinical visits, 3,606 cataract procedures, 1,663 deliveries, 558 trainees and $2.7 million of equipment still working in ten years — and it credits African Mission Healthcare with surgeries the hospitals largely paid for themselves.
- $1,734 each, dividing by the 6,726 “surgical and corrective procedures” on the Form 990, against all programme spending — About $1,734. The 990 says 6,726 for the same calendar year in which the highlights book says 5,942 surgeries and 3,606 cataract procedures. Neither document defines its unit and the two do not reconcile.
- $30.31 each, dividing by clinical visits, against all programme spending — The broadest unit published, at about $30 each. An outpatient visit and a laparotomy are not the same event and this denominator should never be compared with a cost per surgery.
What the ministry advertises
“In 2025, SAFE sponsored 3,294 surgeries at an average cost of $430 and 432 normal deliveries at an average cost of $30.”
Your Impact in 2025 (highlights book)
Advertised: $430 per sponsored surgery. Documented: $426. The two agree within 1%.
“According to collaborators at Duke University, surgery to prevent a year of disability costs just $67 at Gidel Hospital in the Nuba Mountains”
That works out to $67 per year of disability averted, on the ministry’s own figure. It is a different unit from the one divided out above — surgery sponsored through the SAFE programme — so the two numbers do not check each other, and we do not pretend they do.
“96% of giving goes to Healthcare for Patients”
“99% success rate”
Why this is the church’s work
The Samaritan on the Jericho road did two things: he bandaged the man himself, and then he paid an innkeeper to keep caring for him and promised to cover the overrun. African Mission Healthcare is the second half of that parable turned into an organisation. It does not treat anyone. It pays the people who do, at hospitals founded by missionaries for exactly this purpose, and the instruction Jesus attached to the story was to go and do likewise.
“He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him. And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, “Take care of him, and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.””
Luke 10:34–35
“Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons. You received without paying; give without pay.”
Matthew 10:8
“I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.”
Matthew 25:36
Our reservations
- This is the one cause in the health category whose own faith commitment is second-hand. African Mission Healthcare publishes no statement of faith and does not describe itself as a Christian organisation. What it says is that it funds “Christian medical missionaries and mission hospitals”, that its co-founder Dr Fielder was “motivated by his Christian faith”, and that its other co-founder Mark Gerson was “Inspired by his Jewish faith” to do the same work. It also awards the L’Chaim Prize for Outstanding Christian Medical Mission Service. The gospel is being preached at the hospitals it funds, by people it did not hire. That is a real and defensible arrangement, and it is not the same thing as a Christian ministry, so we have scored it as what it is.
- Roughly 96% of programme spending leaves the building as grants — $11,209,194 of $11,660,370 in 2025. Everything a donor is buying happens inside someone else’s accounts, audited by someone else, counted by someone else.
- Three members of one family sit on the board, which the Form 990 discloses: Mark Gerson as chairman, Erica Gerson and Richard Gerson as directors. The Gersons are also the reason the administrative ratio is so low — they and other donors “voluntarily underwrite these expenses”. Founder funding and founder governance are concentrated in the same household.
- Paying a hospital per surgery rewards volume. African Mission Healthcare says the sponsorships also “reward the hospitals for performing quality surgery”, but nothing published explains how quality is assessed or what stops a partner from selecting easier cases.
A judgement about the work, not a measurement of its results. We do not score souls.
Why a dollar goes further here
Income per person in Burundi is about 370× below the United States.
The hospital already exists, the surgeon is already there, and in most cases both were paid for by a century of other people’s mission giving. African Mission Healthcare buys the marginal operation on top of that sunk base, at African salary and supply costs, which is why its own sponsorship price is in the hundreds of dollars rather than the thousands. The second lever is equipment: 2025 investments in equipment and infrastructure “totaled $2.7 million” and the ministry expects them to make more than 2.8 million lifetime patient visits possible, which is capacity that keeps producing after the gift. The third is training — 558 health workers in 2025 — in a continent the ministry says has 24% of the world’s illness and 3% of its health workers.
What creates the leverage
- Rides an existing network — Delivery runs through churches, schools or clinics that already exist and are already staffed, so the gift is not paying to build the channel.
- Low local cost base — Wages, rent, fuel and materials are priced to the local economy, so the same work costs a fraction of what it costs in a high-income country.
- Local workers, not sent staff — The work is done by believers who already live there. No relocation, no expatriate salary, no home-country cost of living to cover.
- Builds something that lasts — The money buys a well, a building or a piece of equipment that keeps delivering for years after the gift.
The cost base, country by country
| Country | Income per person | Below United States |
|---|---|---|
| Burundi | $240 | 370× |
| Malawi | $600 | 148× |
| Liberia | $830 | 107× |
| Sudan | $900 | 99× |
| South Sudan (2015 — latest available) | $1,050 | 85× |
| Ethiopia | $1,110 | 80× |
| Uganda | $1,120 | 79× |
| Tanzania | $1,270 | 70× |
| Cameroon | $1,860 | 48× |
| Kenya | $2,200 | 40× |
| Gabon | $8,090 | 11× |
GNI per capita, Atlas method, current US dollars · World Bank · read 2026-09-19
This is a cost-of-living ratio, not a measure of how well the ministry spends. It tells you what a local wage or a bag of cement costs, and nothing about whether the work is any good — the rest of this page is for that.
Desk review
10 of 15
- Gospel centrality
- The work is done at Christian mission hospitals and the ministry funds “Christian medical missionaries” by name, but African Mission Healthcare itself publishes no statement of faith, is co-founded and chaired by a donor who describes his motivation as Jewish, and never claims to be a Christian organisation. The gospel is in the hospitals, not in the funder’s own words.
- Is the gospel named and central, rather than implied by the ministry’s history?
- Local leadership
- The surgery, the hospital and the surgeon are African or long-resident missionary, and 558 African health workers were trained in 2025. But the model is a US foundation awarding grants: the decisions about which hospital gets funded, and the board making them, are American.
- Is the work led and staffed by believers from the place it serves?
- Financial transparency
- The full Form 990 is posted on the site with Part III programme detail and a line-by-line Part IX, and four external ratings are displayed. Marked down because the 2025 audited financial statements are behind a page with no downloadable file, and because ECFA — the accreditation that speaks to evangelical governance — is absent.
- Can an outsider find audited statements, a Form 990, and accreditation?
- Evidence of outcomes
- Counts are specific and unusually varied: surgeries, cataract procedures, deliveries, C-sections, trainees, clinical visits. Marked down because the 990 and the highlights book give different numbers for the same year and neither defines its unit, and because every count is produced by a grantee hospital rather than by African Mission Healthcare.
- Does the ministry publish counts of what was delivered, defined clearly enough to check?
- Cost per outcome is computable
- The best in the directory, and the only case where a ministry’s advertised price survives contact with its own filing: $430 × 3,294 surgeries plus $30 × 432 deliveries comes to $1,429,380 against the $1,404,561 the Form 990 reports for the SAFE programme, agreement within 1.8%, with the spending line and the surgery count printed in the same return. The limit is scope rather than quality — SAFE is $1.4 million of a $11.7 million programme, and the other $10.3 million of hospital support has no denominator anywhere.
- Are both a spending figure and an outcome count published, so cost per outcome can be divided out?
What we have not verified
- What the $430 includes. It is a sponsorship payment to a hospital, not the cost of a surgery: the theatre, the surgeon’s salary, the building and the sterilising equipment were paid for by someone else, often decades ago. Dividing all programme spending by all surgeries gives about $1,962 instead — and the gap between those two numbers is the hospital’s own subsidy, not an inefficiency, which is why this page divides the SAFE line by the SAFE surgeries rather than setting the two against each other. Neither figure is the full cost of an operation, and nothing published states what that is.
- The Form 990 reports 6,726 “surgical and corrective procedures” in 2025. The highlights book for the same year reports 5,942 surgeries plus 3,606 cataract procedures. The 990 reports “approximately 474,841 direct patient visits”; the highlights book reports 384,679 clinical visits. Two documents from the same ministry about the same twelve months, and we cannot reconcile either pair.
- The 2025 audited financial statements are not downloadable. The financial accountability page links to a page for them, and that page contains no file. Everything financial here comes from the Form 990.
- Who counted the surgeries. African Mission Healthcare performs none of them; each number originates with a grantee hospital, and no independent verification of any partner’s count is published.
- The Duke University figure of $67 per year of disability averted is attributed to “collaborators” with no paper, date or method cited. We could not find the underlying study.
- The “99% success rate” in the SAFE programme is published without a definition of success, a follow-up window or a sample size. For surgery those three things are the claim.
- African Mission Healthcare is not ECFA accredited, and no statement of faith or doctrinal basis is published anywhere on the site.
- How much of 2025’s spending bought future years rather than this one. The ministry says its investments will enable more than 2.8 million lifetime patient visits — so a large share of this year’s money is capacity, not care delivered, and no split is published.
Accreditation seen
- Charity Navigator four stars
- Candid Platinum Transparency
- Excellence in Giving certified transparent
- Approved International Charity, Combined Federal Campaign
Displayed by the ministry on its own pages. We have not re-checked each seal with the accrediting body.
Worth knowing
- 2025 totals from the Form 990: $13,288,857 of expenses, of which $11,660,370 programme, $627,876 management and general, $1,000,611 fundraising. Grants made up $11,209,194 of the programme figure.
- The administrative ratio is genuinely low, and the ministry explains why: “Your portion of our administrative and fundraising costs remains below 4% due to the generosity of donors who voluntarily underwrite these expenses.” The overhead is real and someone else is paying it. A donor comparing this ratio with other ministries is not comparing like with like.
- For a comparison inside this directory: CURE International, which owns and staffs its own children’s hospitals, spends about $1,900 of programme money per surgery. African Mission Healthcare, which owns nothing, lands at about $1,962 if you charge its whole programme to surgeries the same way — the first of the alternates above, not the figure on this page. The similarity is a coincidence of two very different models and should not be read as either one being validated by the other.
- The 2025 figures come from a calendar-year Form 990 filed in 2026 and a highlights book published in 2026 covering 2025. Both are the ministry’s most recent.
Sources
- Homepage
Ministry website · African Mission Healthcare · read 2026-09-18
- About Us
Ministry website · African Mission Healthcare · read 2026-09-18
Source of the mission statement and of the description of the two founders, one Christian and one Jewish.
- Our History
Ministry website · African Mission Healthcare · read 2026-09-18
Where the L’Chaim Prize for Outstanding Christian Medical Mission Service is described.
- Our Impact
Ministry website · African Mission Healthcare · read 2026-09-18
The headline counters on this page are loaded by script and did not render for us; the quoted claims are from the printed list of clinical results below them.
- Financial Accountability
Ministry website · African Mission Healthcare · read 2026-09-18
Lists the four external ratings. The “96%” is rendered by an animated counter; we took it from the page’s own markup. The link to the 2025 audited statements leads to a page with no file on it.
- 2025 Form 990
IRS Form 990 · African Mission Healthcare · 2025 · read 2026-09-18
Calendar 2025. Part IX line 25 gives programme $11,660,370 of $13,288,857 total. Part III splits it into $10,255,809 of hospital support and $1,404,561 of SAFE surgical sponsorship, and Schedule O carries the 3,294 surgeries, 432 births, 558 trainees and $2.7 million of equipment.
- Your Impact in 2025 (highlights book)
Annual report · African Mission Healthcare · 2025 · read 2026-09-18
A designed annual report with no financial statements in it. Every count here comes from graphic panels, and the SAFE cost sentence is set across nine short lines inside an illustration — we have reflowed it to one line and changed nothing else.
- IRS filings for African Mission Healthcare Foundation, EIN 27-3663856
Third party · ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer · read 2026-09-18