Keypoints:
- Africa takes map reform fight to UN vote
- Equal Earth preserves relative continental sizes
- Campaign links cartography with global representation
AFRICA’S challenge to the distorted way continental size is represented on many familiar world maps is heading to the United Nations, with the General Assembly set to vote on Friday, September 4, 2026, on an African-led resolution.
The vote would mark the biggest diplomatic advance yet for the ‘Correct the Map’ campaign, taking an initiative championed by Togo and backed by the African Union from continental advocacy to a global decision point over how the world should depict itself.
Togo takes campaign to UN vote
The move follows months of diplomatic preparation. Africa Briefing reported earlier this year that Togo was preparing to take the map reform campaign to the UN, after the AU rallied behind a shift towards projections that more accurately preserve the relative size of continents.
South Africa’s SABC News reported on September 3, 2026, that the General Assembly would vote on the African-led draft the following day.
Togo’s Foreign Minister Robert Dussey has stressed that the initiative goes beyond his country.
‘This campaign is not a Togolese initiative. It’s for the African continent,’ he told SABC News.
What the resolution would change
The draft does not seek to ban the Mercator projection, which remains useful for navigation and other specialised purposes.
Instead, it encourages governments, schools, international organisations and technology companies to use Equal Earth and other equal-area projections when the aim is to compare the true relative sizes of countries and continents.
Equal Earth, introduced in 2018, preserves relative land area while accepting other distortions that are unavoidable when representing a spherical planet on a flat surface.
The proposal would seek to promote wider use of equal-area maps in education, public communication and digital platforms.
Why Mercator changes perceptions
Created in the 16th century for navigation, the Mercator projection preserves direction and angles but increasingly enlarges landmasses as latitude rises.
As a result, Europe, Greenland, Russia and northern parts of North America appear disproportionately large compared with Africa and other regions closer to the equator.
Greenland, for example, can look similar in size to Africa on a Mercator map even though Africa is roughly 14 times larger.
The issue is therefore not that Africa is literally reduced below its geographical dimensions on the projection, but that northern landmasses are enlarged so dramatically that Africa appears much smaller by comparison.
Africa links maps to global representation
African leaders formally endorsed the Correct the Map campaign at their February 2026 summit, adopted the Equal Earth projection and urged member states to revise national curricula accordingly.
The AU has linked the campaign to historical justice and Africa’s global repositioning.
That argument echoes a wider African challenge to international systems that many leaders say no longer reflect the continent’s demographic and geopolitical importance.
Africa accounts for more than a quarter of UN member states yet has no permanent seat on the Security Council, an imbalance increasingly central to debates about Africa’s representation and the credibility of global institutions.
The map campaign also follows Ghana’s successful push to force reparations and historical justice higher onto the UN agenda, underscoring a broader shift towards African states using multilateral diplomacy to shape global narratives rather than merely respond to them.
What happens next?
The official UN programme confirms a General Assembly plenary on September 4, 2026, to deal with outstanding items from its 80th session, although the publicly listed schedule does not specifically identify the African map resolution.
Approval would give the campaign its strongest international endorsement yet and shift attention towards whether schools, governments, international bodies and major technology platforms actually change the maps they use.
For Africa, the question now extends well beyond geography: whether correcting a centuries-old visual distortion can also help correct the way the continent’s place in the world is perceived.
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