West Africa Theological Institute

WATI (West Africa Theological Institute) began in 2005 by the then Senegal Team to meet a need for reformed theological training for national pastors, church planters and national missionaries in francophone West Africa. Although initially the students were just from Senegal by 2006 students were coming from Ivory Coast and Togo as well. The West Africa Training Team responsible for the school currently consists of John, Flavien and Tom. The school is run by a board comprised of 6 members including representatives from 3 African countries, France and the US. These members represent both the African national partnership (SPARC) and the West Africa Partnership. Tom (MTW missionary) is the director of the school and Mamadou (Senegal national leader) is the president of the school board.

The program is modular with there being 4 modules per year, each module having two 1-week courses for a total of 8 courses/year. Many of the courses are taught by resident missionaries and there are also visiting French-speaking professors coming to teach. The school offers bachelor’s and master’s degrees as well as a certificate program for those unable to do the work of a degree program. The program is designed to be completed in 4-4½ years. There are currently around 12 students enrolled from the 3 countries.

Training Trainers

In addition to wanting to train national pastors, church planters and missionaries, WATI also wants to be training nationals who will be able to take this pastoral training and start up their own reformed pastoral training programs in their own countries. There is a strong grace-based focus in the teaching and curriculum. Another related objective is to train more African teachers who can in the future teach courses currently being taught by missionaries. This is already taking place to some extent in certain courses.

It is very much a part of the WATI vision to see other local training centers open in other countries. To this end most of the courses are being videotaped to be edited onto DVD’s to be used either as distance education or to help local teachers to teach their own courses. Our vision is to see nationally-led training centers in all of the francophone West African partner countries in the future.

Financial Snapshot

There are two major areas of financial needs. The biggest one is to have annual pledged support for the school. The current annual budget runs about $50,000/year and we don’t have pledges anywhere near that amount. Much of this goes for paying airfare for foreign students to attend courses, some airfare for visiting professors and for books for the students. The students pay a modest portion of their total expenses. It costs about $250/course/student not including the international airfare. The second area of financial need is for the purchase of equipment to edit the course film to put onto DVD’s. The estimated cost for this is around $7,000.