Addis Ababa, Ethiopia · UTC+3 ☆

Addis Ababa is in the Africa/Addis_Ababa timezone (EAT/UTC+3), with no daylight saving. Ethiopia’s capital and Africa’s fourth-largest city has a population of around 5 million.

Addis Ababa officially runs on East Africa Time, UTC+3. That is the clock on your phone, the time on international flight schedules, the offset that developers use. But ask someone on the street what time it is and you may get a different answer.

Ethiopia has its own traditional timekeeping system. The day begins at sunrise, roughly 6am by the standard clock. So 6am standard time is “12 o’clock” in the Ethiopian system. 7am is “1 o’clock.” Noon is “6 o’clock.” The clock resets twice: once at sunrise, once at sunset. It is a solar clock, tied to the actual rhythm of day and night rather than an arbitrary start at midnight.

This system is widely used in daily conversation, in markets, among taxi drivers, in churches. Signs and broadcast media often use standard time. But a meeting time mentioned casually in Amharic might require clarifying which system you mean.

Ethiopia’s own calendar

Ethiopia also uses its own calendar, the Ge’ez calendar, which has 13 months and runs roughly 7 to 8 years behind the Gregorian calendar. In September 2007, Ethiopia celebrated the new millennium while the rest of the world was in 2007.

Nairobi shares the UTC+3 timezone, making business coordination across East Africa straightforward on the official clock. 9am in Addis Ababa is 6am in London.

Sources

• IANA Time Zone Database - Africa/Addis_Ababa
• Ethiopian Calendar and Time System