UN endorses 'Correct The Map' campaign to show Africa's true size

On Friday, the United Nations General Assembly took a step that sounds simple but carries weight: it voted to encourage the world to look at Africa differently. The resolution, titled "Correct The Map," passed with 164 member states in favor. Only the United States voted against it. Six countries—Serbia, Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Moldova, and Ukraine—abstained. The campaign behind it, led by Togo and backed by the African Union and advocacy organizations, asks governments and institutions to abandon a map projection that has shaped how we see the world for more than four centuries.

The Mercator projection, created by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in the 16th century to help European navigators chart ocean routes, has a fundamental problem: it distorts size. On a Mercator map, Greenland looks roughly as large as Africa. In reality, Africa is about 14 times bigger. The same projection makes North America and regions near the poles appear swollen while shrinking Africa and South America. It is not a map made in bad faith—it was designed for a specific purpose, navigation at sea—but its consequences have rippled through centuries of education, imagination, and how people understand their place in the world.

The alternative is the Equal Earth projection, introduced in 2018. It accounts for the Earth's curvature and presents continents in proportions that match their actual size. Under this map, Africa appears as it truly is: massive, dominant, impossible to ignore. Togo's foreign minister, Robert Dussey, framed the stakes plainly before the vote: "Maps shape our understanding of the world. They guide education, nourish the imagination, and influence collective perceptions." It is not hyperbole. A child who grows up looking at a Mercator map absorbs a particular hierarchy of continents, a particular sense of which places matter and how large they are.

The resolution does not ban the Mercator projection or force anyone to switch. It encourages—that is the operative word. Governments and institutions are invited to consider using Equal Earth instead. The French Foreign Minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, captured the paradox after the vote: "Changing the map obviously doesn't change the world. But correcting a representation that distorts it is already an act of truth." Africa No Filter, one of the leading organizations behind the campaign, was direct about what comes next: "We want to see accurate maps in schools, textbooks, newsrooms, businesses and on the digital platforms billions of people use every day."

The American vote against the resolution stands alone. No other nation joined it. That isolation itself is a fact worth noting—a signal that the rest of the world, or at least the vast majority of UN members, sees something worth correcting in how maps have represented Africa for centuries. What happens now depends on whether schools order new atlases, whether news organizations update their graphics, whether the digital platforms that billions of people use daily choose to shift their default view of the Earth. The resolution opens a door. Whether institutions walk through it remains to be seen.