President Adama Barrow has now announced that The Gambia’s hosting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, which had been rescheduled three times since 2020, will now take place on May 4th of next year.

According to President Adama Barrow, the Gambia OIC summit, which was originally scheduled to take place in Banjul in 2020 but was postponed three times due to a lack of preparation, will be held in Banjul in May next year.

Speaking to journalists at arrival in Banjul after returning from the Saudi-Africa summit in Riyadh, the Gambian president said the new date for hosting the conference has been rescheduled to be much more realistic for The Gambia.

“We are the country that was supposed to host the next summit, which was scheduled for November 16th this year, but due to circumstances related to security and other challenges, we decided it was better to push it further,” President Barrow explained.

The decision was reached after high-level discussions with other heads of OIC member states and the organization’s secretariat, according to the Gambian president, after which the new date was “unanimously agreed as the best time to host the world’s second largest gathering of world leaders in the Gambia.”

The Gambia had failed to complete infrastructure projects such as dual carriageways, a 5-star summit hotel, an international conference center, and a VVIP lounge at Banjul International Airport in time for the rescheduled November 2023 summit.

President Barrow and his administration were granted a postponement because, aside from the conference center and the VVIP lounge, which were finished a year ago, the other projects necessary to hold the summit in Banjul may take several more months to complete.