Editorial guides

Guides for leave and holiday planning in Africa

These pages are written for people who need to book leave, close a payroll week, or travel with children around African public holidays — not for a generic world calendar. Each guide is a standalone article with its own facts and a named author.

By Collins Odeny. Last updated: 19 October 2026.

All guides

Planning leave around Kenyan public holidaysKenya’s year is easiest to read once you separate three documents: the Kenya Gazette for named public holidays, your employer’s observed calendar, and — if you have school-age children — the Ministry of Education circular. This guide is about using those documents together, not reciting the holiday list.Planning leave around Nigerian federal holidaysNigeria’s useful split is not “Muslim holidays versus Christian holidays.” It is federal announcement versus state circular, and Friday national days versus Sunday national days. This guide is about that split. It is not a second copy of the holiday list.Planning leave around South African public holidaysSouth Africa is the country on this site where a statute, not only a gazette notice, explains the extra Mondays. The Public Holidays Act is why Sunday 9 August 2026 produces Monday 10 August on the list. This guide starts from that rule, then walks the three years I have written hubs for.Planning leave around Ghanaian public holidaysGhana is the first new country leave guide in this series because the 2001 Act, the 2025 amendment, and the holiday list I started from do not start from the same schedule. Act 1142 is the governing amendment I am following. The Ministry of the Interior is the announcement door. This site’s Ghana list is the third document, and it is not yet a gazette.Planning leave around Egyptian official holidaysEgypt is the country on this site where the official year list and this site’s holiday list diverge in public. The Presidency published a 2026 holiday table I could open. This site’s Egypt list still prints several civil commemorative dates. Leave planning starts by holding those two documents next to each other, not by pretending they are the same grid.Planning leave around Tanzanian public holidaysTanzania’s statute is short and specific. Cap. 35 names the days. The holiday list this site started from adds a few more names and, until the Cap. 35 correction is applied, gets Zanzibar Revolution Day wrong by ten days. This guide starts from the Act I opened, then shows what this site actually lists.Planning leave around Ugandan public holidaysUganda’s public-holiday statute, as I opened it on ULII, records Cap. 255 (Revised Edition, 2000) as the previous revised chapter. The 31 December 2023 consolidation on that page is titled Chapter 174. The Schedule is the legal list. This site’s Uganda list includes a couple of extras and one Easter Sunday the Act does not name. Leave planning starts by separating those layers.Mashujaa Day: from Kenyatta Day to Heroes’ Day20 October is still the same civil date it was when the day was called Kenyatta Day. The name, the constitutional status, and the leave conversation all changed. This page is about that change, and about how I treat the Tuesday, Wednesday, or Friday that 20 October becomes in a given year.Nigeria’s June 12 Democracy Day: why it moved from 29 MayFor eighteen years the federal public conversation treated 29 May as Democracy Day. On 6 June 2018 the State House published a different date. This page follows that official text, the 2019 inaugural celebration, and the weekday 12 June becomes on this site’s Nigeria list.South Africa’s Heritage Day and the Sunday-to-Monday ruleHeritage Day is 24 September every year. The leave is not always 24 September. Section 2(1) of the Public Holidays Act is why a Sunday Heritage Day becomes a Monday off, and why this site’s 2028 list says Heritage Day (observed) on 25 September.How public holidays affect payrollA public holiday changes a timesheet in more than one way. It can remove a weekday from the working-day count, trigger a different pay rule, or land after the payroll cutoff so the correction appears in the next cycle. This article stays at that conceptual level. It does not quote a statutory rate.School terms, holidays, and family travelA national public holiday is a bad proxy for “the children are off.” Terms, half-terms, exam windows, and gazette holidays overlap in ways that wreck a cheap flight. This guide is about that overlap. The only dated school circular on Africa Calendar is Kenya 2026.Moon-sighting holidays: why the date movesEid is not late. The Gregorian calendar is the one that slips. A lunar year is about eleven days shorter than a solar year, so the same Hijri date walks backward through the civil months. Governments that wait for a moon sighting add a second kind of movement: the date can shift by a day after you have already printed a wall calendar.How to use, print, embed, and share Africa CalendarAfrica Calendar is a small website with a handful of tools that are easy to miss if you only see a month grid. This page is the map: what each URL is for, what works without JavaScript, what stays on your device, and what I will not put in a downloaded file.

Why this series exists

A public-holiday date on a grid answers “is the office closed?” It does not answer whether you should spend annual leave the day before, whether a Sunday holiday becomes a Monday, or whether your child’s term has already ended. I started Africa Calendar as a printable Kenya wall calendar. The written country hubs for Kenya 2026, Nigeria 2026, and South Africa 2026 list named days. These guides sit beside those lists and explain how to plan around them.

First-time visitors often land on a thin catalogue page and leave. I would rather they land on a page that teaches something useful: how Kenyan gazette notices lock an Eid date after the moon is sighted, why Nigerian state governments can add a day the federal list omits, or how South Africa’s Public Holidays Act turns a Sunday commemoration into a Monday off. That is original editorial work, not a year-swap of the same paragraph.

I live in Kenya and operate this site under my own name. I do not sit in a labour ministry and I do not sell legal advice. When a rule varies by employer, bargaining council, or state government, the guide says so and points you at an official notice instead of inventing a number.

How African leave planning differs from a generic calendar

Many imported calendar apps treat every country as Saturday–Sunday rest plus a fixed Christmas. That fails in more than one direction. Egypt and a few North African public-sector calendars still rest Friday and Saturday. Lunar holidays move eleven days earlier each solar year. Several countries observe a neighbouring weekday when a named day lands on Sunday. Federal lists and provincial or state lists are not the same document.

Leave is also a household problem, not only an HR one. In Kenya, the Ministry of Education circular and the Kenya Gazette are different instruments. A parent who books a flight on Mashujaa Day week without checking Term 3 can discover that candidates are still in an exam window. A finance officer who assumes Eid al-Fitr is “around the end of March” will miss a gazetted Friday and file timesheets late.

The tools on this site — the leave planner, the working-days calculator, printable studio layouts, and ICS feeds — are only useful if you already understand the local shape of the year. The guides teach that shape. The tools then do the arithmetic.

The articles in this series

The Kenya leave-planning guide walks the civil year using gazette-backed 2026 Eid dates, the Friday-heavy 2026 map, the 2027 substitute Mondays, and the 2028 April–May cluster. It is the only guide that also places the 2026 basic-education circular I copied onto the school page next to the holiday list. The Mashujaa Day deep-dive sits beside it and follows the 2010 Constitution rename from Kenyatta Day.

The Nigeria leave-planning guide is written around federal announcements and the gap between Abuja and the states. The June 12 Democracy Day deep-dive is the history of why that federal day moved off 29 May. Substitute Mondays appear only when they are already on this site’s holiday list — I do not invent a Monday after every Saturday national day.

The South Africa leave-planning guide starts from the Public Holidays Act Sunday rule, then shows how Freedom Day and Workers’ Day sit in 2026, 2027, and 2028. The Heritage Day deep-dive is the statute behind 24 September and the 2028 observed Monday. Family Day, not “Easter Monday”, is the Monday after Good Friday.

Four more country leave guides are now in the series: Ghana, Egypt, Tanzania, and Uganda. They are written from statutes and notices I could open, plus the holiday lists this project already uses. They are guides only. I have not added /ghana/2026/, /egypt/2026/, /tanzania/2026/, or /uganda/2026/ as written hubs in the sitemap.

Three cross-cutting articles sit after the country maps. How public holidays affect payroll stays at the level of concepts. School terms and family travel uses the Kenya 2026 circular as the only dated school source on this site. Moon-sighting holidays explains why Eid dates move. The last article is the product guide: how to use Africa Calendar.

What belongs on a country hub versus a guide

A country-year hub lists every public holiday the studio paints, with a short note on what the day marks. That is the right page if you need the civil date of Jamhuri Day or Heritage Day. A guide assumes you can already open that list. It talks about bridging Tuesdays, payroll weeks that contain two named days, and the difference between a parade Saturday and a paid Monday.

I keep those jobs separate on purpose. If I stuffed every planning essay into the 2026 Kenya hub, the 2027 and 2028 siblings would either copy it or look empty. The hubs stay year-specific. The guides compare years and explain the machinery underneath.

Thin holiday stubs under /h/ still exist so an in-app tap has a place to land. They are omitted from the sitemap on purpose. Do not treat them as articles. If a search result offers a stub, step up to the hub or to a guide in this series.

How I treat sources

Holiday dates come from the open public-holiday list this project already uses, plus manual corrections I keep when a gazette notice moves a date. Kenya 2026 Eid al-Fitr (Friday 20 March) and Eid al-Adha (Wednesday 27 May) are recorded as gazetted. Kenya 2026 school ranges follow the Ministry of Education circular cited on the school calendar.

For labour law I use cautious language and official front doors I can verify: Kenya Law for gazette notices, the Kenya Ministry of Education homepage for academic circulars, the South African government’s public holidays page, and the Department of Employment and Labour. Nigerian federal holidays are announced by the Federal Ministry of Interior; I name that office without pretending I host its circulars.

If a figure is not on this site and not on a page I can open, I do not print it. That includes statutory leave day counts, overtime multipliers, and exam timetables for countries that have no circular on this site.

Who these pages are for

Households booking leave around a Friday Christmas or a Monday Freedom Day. Team leads who need a shared picture of the year before they approve overlapping time off. Parents matching a school circular to national holidays. Payroll clerks who need to know that a Sunday holiday might become a Monday in one country and remain a weekend in another.

They are not for visa officers, immigration lawyers, or anyone who needs a certified extract of the Kenya Gazette. Print a wall calendar if you want a planning aid. Carry the official notice if you need a legal date.

Ghana, Egypt, Tanzania, and Uganda now have leave essays in this series. Ethiopia and the rest of the 50+ studio list can still print and subscribe. I will not template the next country from the Kenya page. Email contact@africacalendar.app if you have a gazette-backed reason to write another one.

How to read the series without getting lost

Start with the country you actually take leave in. Open its 2026 hub, then the matching leave guide. If you also close payroll, read the payroll article next. If you travel with school-age children, read the school-travel article even if you are not in Kenya — the method transfers, the dated terms do not.

If your workplace includes Muslim colleagues, or if you yourself observe Ramadan, read the moon-sighting guide before you lock March or April travel in any year after 2026. The 2026 Kenya Eid dates are settled on this site; 2027 and 2028 rows are still estimates until a notice appears.

When you are ready to hang paper on a wall or put dates on a phone, use the product guide. It explains PDF, PNG, SVG, ICS subscribe paths such as /feeds/ke-2026.ics, the embed iframe, share cards, and why custom holidays never leave your browser unless you send them in feedback.

What I will not do in these guides

I will not publish a “top ten African holidays” listicle that treats Madaraka Day and Freedom Day as interchangeable folklore. I will not swap the year in a sentence and call it a new article. I will not invent a Ghana or Egypt school term so the sitemap looks fuller.

I will not tell you that you are entitled to a specific number of annual leave days. That number lives in a contract, a statute your counsel has read, or a bargaining council agreement. I will not tell you the overtime multiplier for a Sunday shift in Lagos or Cape Town.

I will correct a date when a notice disagrees with this holiday list. Corrections go to the holiday list first, then into the guide if the planning story changes. The byline date at the top of each article is when I last revised the prose, not when a ministry last gazetted a day.