So this whole Abidjan timezone thing smacked me right in the face last Tuesday morning. Was setting up a call with this client who lives over in Ivory Coast.
Thought it’d be easy peasy. Pulled up my calendar, typed in “Ivory Coast time.” Boom, saw Greenwich Mean Time. Made my appointment slot based on that.
Fast forward to the meeting time. Me, sitting there with my coffee looking all professional. Client? Nowhere. Ten minutes tick by. Started sweating a little. Checked my calendar again—yep, time conversion was right. Sent a polite follow-up email.
Found out later the guy was sitting in his office waiting for me an hour EARLIER. Total confusion. He mentioned something about “Abidjan time” not being the same as where he lived? Didn’t compute.
Here’s What I Dug Up Afterwards:
- First, double-checked Ivory Coast’s actual time zone. Scrolled through like five different sites because the internet’s messy like that. Kept seeing GMT+0 everywhere.
- Finally landed on a legit article explaining that yes, the entire country uses Abidjan time, GMT/UTC+0 all year. No Daylight Savings flip-flopping nonsense.
- But why did my client seem confused? Turns out he recently moved across the border. Told me he’d been defaulting to old habits.
The kicker? This GMT+0 zone cuts across several West African countries, not just Ivory Coast. One fixed time. Sounds simple, right?
Not quite. Here’s how it affects real people:
- If you’re coordinating between Abidjan time and somewhere like Europe, that hour difference will bite you because they shift to CEST in summer. Got my meeting snafu right there!
- West Africans traveling regionally get caught out too. Borders don’t always mean time zone shifts, but sometimes they do. Creates chaos.
End of the day, I learned to triple confirm with the actual city when scheduling anything international, no matter what the country time zone says. Fixed my workflow like this:
- Ask person for their city.
- Look up that city’s offset, not the country.
- Mention the time zone name like “Abidjan time GMT+0” to be crystal clear.
Saved my sanity. No more ghosted meetings. Simple tweak. Big relief.
