I live here, which is probably why I keep being surprised by how little accurate material exists on African time zones, and especially on one genuinely fascinating exception: Morocco. So here's the full picture, explained by someone who converts between Kigali, UTC+2, and half the world every day.
The Map in One Table
Africa spans four main standard offsets, ranging UTC+0 to UTC+4:
| Offset | Main countries | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| UTC+0 | UK-mirrors: Ghana, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Mali, Guinea, Liberia, Morocco, and more | Morocco is the only African country in this band with DST |
| UTC+1 | Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon, Angola, Tunisia, Algeria, Chad, Benin, and the DRC's west | Algeria uses UTC+1 year-round |
| UTC+2 | Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda, Libya, Egypt, DRC east, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique | Egypt reintroduced DST in 2023 (briefly: UTC+3 in summer) |
| UTC+3 | Ethiopia, Somalia, Tanzania, Madagascar, and much of the Horn | Ethiopia famously kept quirky civil time conventions (more below) |
| UTC+4 | Mauritius and Seychelles | Ocean islands on their own schedule |
Why So Little DST
Daylight saving exists to shift an hour of light from morning to evening, which only helps when day length changes a lot between seasons. Africa straddles the equator, and day length near it barely moves across the year. East African cities like Kigali or Nairobi get 12-ish hours of daylight essentially year-round. Moving clocks when there's nothing to move buys exactly nothing. So the continent just... doesn't. That's the same reason most of Asia and South America skip it too.
The Morocco Exception (It's Complicated)
Morocco, in the UTC+0 band, does observe DST to match European daylight, but it makes an additional adjustment that makes its clock a near-comedy: during the month of Ramadan, Morocco observes standard time (UTC+0) instead of daylight saving (UTC+1), "breaking" the fast-on-time clock. When Ramadan ends, back to UTC+1. Because Ramadan shifts around the calendar each year, Morocco can change clocks up to four times a year, at politically timed dates that get announced late. Western Sahara follows Morocco's schedule.
If you schedule calls into Morocco, this is not a footnote; it's a regular calendar hazard. The browser timezone database handles it, which is exactly why a date-aware converter is the right tool rather than a memorised offset.
Egypt's Flip-Flop
Egypt abandoned DST in 2011 and quietly brought it back in 2023, moving to UTC+3 for summer. This is a perfect example of why "Egypt time" you memorised in 2019 is not "Egypt time" now. Timezone rules are political and recent.
Ethiopia: The Clock That's 12 Hours Different
Ethiopia has a genuinely different convention worth knowing if you visit: both the 12-hour clock and the day start at dawn (about 6 AM in our terms). Ethiopian local time 1:00 is, by international standards, 7:00 in the morning, and "3 AM in the morning" can mean 9 AM on an international schedule. Combined with Calendrical differences (their calendar runs on a different year count), a foreigner can feel a full day out of phase. Airlines and formal business operate on international civil time; the street clock may not. Rule: always confirm "airport time" vs. "local market time."
One Practical Note for International Callers
Most of Africa has no DST, which means the change in the difference between an African city and, say, New York comes entirely from the US side. New York is 7 hours behind Kigali in North American winter, 6 in their summer. If you were scheduling from memory, this is exactly the kind of twice-yearly shift that silently moves meetings.