Africa Inland Mission had its beginning in the work of Peter Cameron Scott (1867–1896), a Scottish-American missionary who served two years in the Congo before being forced to seek medical care in Britain in 1892 because of a near-fatal illness.

While recuperating, he developed his idea of establishing a network of mission stations which would stretch from the southeast coast of Africa to the interior's Lake Chad.

More important than specialized training, AIM found acceptance among tribal people based on Christian commitment and moral standing.

He and his family moved to Africa and for the next two decades he provided strong, if not undisputed, leadership for the headquarters, established in 1903 at Kijabe, Kenya.

[2][3] Of the Kikuyu who showed interest in the mission and its activities, many were from what would be considered the bottom rungs of society, lacking property and power, including ahoi (landless tenants) and people who were neither mbari nor riika leaders and unlikely to be so in future.

In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt pulled some strings, persuading the Belgian government to permit a mission station in colonial Congo.

Work began in Uganda in 1918; in French Equatorial Africa (Central African Republic) in 1924; Sudan in 1949; and the islands of the Indian Ocean in 1975.