VPN World • Diplomacy
UN Votes 164 to 1 to Adopt a World Map That Shows Africa’s True Size
The General Assembly backed the “Correct the Map” resolution on Friday, pushing to retire the Mercator projection that has shrunk Africa in the world’s imagination for centuries. The United States cast the only vote against it. The Bahamas helped sponsor it.
The United Nations General Assembly voted on Friday to endorse a world map that shows countries at their true relative size, adopting the “Correct the Map” resolution 164 to 1, with six abstentions. Togo brought the text on behalf of the African Union, the Bahamas co-sponsored, and both France and the United Kingdom voted in favour. The United States was the only member state to vote no.
The resolution is not binding. It does not ban the Mercator projection or force any replacement, and sailors and pilots can keep using Mercator, whose straight compass lines still make it useful for navigation. What the text asks is narrower and more practical: that schools, governments, UN offices and mapping companies reach for an equal-area map when the point is size.
“A fair world begins with a fair map,” Togo’s foreign minister, Robert Dussey, told Reuters ahead of the vote. He said Togo aims to change its own school geography materials by the end of the year and will press other governments, institutions and technology companies to move toward the Equal Earth projection.
The old picture and the real one
Gerardus Mercator drew his chart in 1569 for sailors, not students. To keep compass headings straight, the projection stretches land near the poles and shrinks land near the equator. That single design choice is why classroom maps still mislead on size. Africa is made to look about as large as Greenland, when it is roughly 14 times larger. The contiguous United States, China, India, Japan, Mexico and much of Europe could all fit inside the African continent with room to spare. Europe, North America and Russia look bigger than they are, while Africa, Latin America and South Asia look smaller.
The alternative is not new. Cartographers published the Equal Earth projection in 2018 to keep relative area close to the truth. On it, Europe and Greenland shrink, Brazil grows, and Africa finally looks like the giant it is. The African Union adopted Equal Earth in March, Togo formally asked UN members to follow in April, the Assembly held informal consultations in July, and Friday’s vote sealed it.
Moky Makura, executive director of the campaign group Africa No Filter, called the distortion more than a drawing error, describing it as the longest-running misinformation problem in the world. “Now the real work begins,” she said after the vote, arguing that Africa does not need to be made bigger, only to be seen accurately, and that the goal is correct maps in schools, textbooks, newsrooms and the digital platforms billions of people use daily.
Washington objects, Paris moves
The United States saw politics, not geometry. Its representative told the Assembly that the resolution mocked the work and purpose of the institution, and singled out the text’s references to reparations and “cognitive justice” as part of a broader ideological project, calling such initiatives a drain on the body’s credibility. Washington framed the measure as ideological and superfluous, a distraction from the harder work of peace and prosperity.
France went the other way, and further than a vote. Hours before the ballot, Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot announced from the Sorbonne that Paris would abandon the Mercator projection for official maps in favour of ones truer to real surface area. The United States, Russia and China, he said, take on a disproportionate visual prominence next to Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia, and such distortions eventually take root in perceptions. The time had come, he said, to correct them.
Six countries abstained, according to the UN’s own record: Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Moldova, Serbia and Ukraine.
What the vote does not change
Borders do not move. No economy grows because a continent looks larger on paper, and no flat map is flawless, since Equal Earth trades away some accuracy of shape to protect area, and Mercator keeps its place at sea. What can change is quieter and slower: the textbook, the ministry slide, the default view inside software. Campaigners want mapping platforms, publishers and classrooms to stop teaching that the largest tropical landmass on Earth is a mid-size island.
The Caribbean angle
The same geometry that shrinks Africa shrinks the tropics generally, which is why this vote is not only an African story. Equatorial and Caribbean nations have lived for generations under a picture that made the global North loom larger than it is. That is why the Bahamas put its name on the resolution as a co-sponsor, and why the Caribbean Community’s own Reparations Commission has endorsed the Equal Earth map, framing the switch as a rejection of a projection it links to an ideology of power and dominance.
For St Vincent and the Grenadines, the practical reach is the same as anywhere: the maps in Vincentian classrooms and on Vincentian phones are the same distorted default. If the resolution moves publishers and platforms, it moves what a child in Kingstown grows up believing the world looks like.
Africa did not ask the UN to invent land. It asked the world to stop drawing it small. The globe never needed a vote. The picture of it did.
- 164 to 1The vote to adopt the resolution, with the US the lone no and six abstentions
- 14xHow much larger Africa actually is than Greenland, which Mercator shows as its equal
- 1569The year Mercator drew his chart, for navigation rather than for classrooms
- 2018The year the Equal Earth projection was published to keep relative area honest
VPN verified this report against the UN record and international coverage of Friday’s vote. The resolution is non-binding and its effect depends on schools, publishers and technology companies choosing to act. Power to the People.