For nearly a decade after his conversion, Nabanga remained Vanuatu's only local Muslim. Sustained growth began after 1995, when a Nigerian resident, Mohammed Lawal Amadu, spent over a decade spreading the faith across the islands — deliberately approaching village chiefs first, on the reasoning that a chief's conversion would draw entire extended families and clans along with it. A prayer hall opened in Mele in 1992, the same year the Port Vila Grand Mosque — still the country's principal mosque — was established, and interest reportedly grew again after Cyclone Pam devastated the islands in 2015, when the community's relief efforts introduced Islam to new communities.
Even after that growth, Vanuatu's Muslim population is estimated at only a few hundred people, most of them around Port Vila on Efate. The wider archipelago, however, stretches close to 1,300 kilometres from the Torres Islands in the north to Aneityum in the south, so while almost everyone prays in or near the capital today, prayer times drawn from Efate would not suit anyone living on the far northern or southern islands — which is exactly the gap a location-specific calculator like this one is meant to close.
Vanuatu's mosques follow the Muslim World League's standard convention, a sound default for a community without its own fatwa council and for a latitude — around 17° south at Port Vila — where day length shifts only moderately across the year.
Community relief and support work carried out by Muslim residents in the aftermath of the 2015 cyclone is credited with introducing Islam to communities that had little prior contact with it, contributing to the modest growth seen in the years that followed.
Yes — the Torres Islands in the far north and Aneityum in the far south sit roughly 5–6° of latitude apart from each other, enough that Maghrib and Fajr times calculated for one can differ by a meaningful margin from the other, even though both keep the same official time zone as Port Vila.
Yes — it opened in 1992, the same year as an earlier prayer hall in nearby Mele, and remains Vanuatu's principal mosque and the community's main gathering point today.
Vanuatu's traditional social structure gives chiefs significant influence over their extended family and village, so early missionaries reasoned — correctly, in several documented cases — that a chief's conversion would lead his broader community to follow.