The UN General Assembly has voted to encourage governments, schools and technology firms to stop using world maps that make Africa look smaller than it is.
The resolution, titled “Correct the Map” and led by Togo on behalf of the 54 African member states and backed by the African Union, passed on September 4 by 164 votes to one, with six abstentions.
France co-sponsored the text, and its foreign ministry said it would drop the Mercator projection from its own publications.
The United States cast the only vote against. Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Moldova, Serbia and Ukraine abstained.
The text is not binding and does not ban the familiar Mercator map.
It asks institutions to use equal-area projections, notably Equal Earth (2018), where comparative land area matters, and to teach the limits of any flat map of a round planet.
Togo’s foreign ministry said the vote “in no way challenges the use of the Mercator projection for maritime and aerial navigation, for which it remains fully suited”.
“Maps shape our understanding of the world,” Togo’s foreign minister Robert Dussey said before the vote. “They guide education, nourish the imagination, and influence collective perceptions.”
On Friday, the United Nations General Assembly adopted an African proposal for a new world map, which shows countries’ true size relative to one another.
In favor: 164
Against: 1
Abstentions: 6 pic.twitter.com/5BE4LUiojH— UN News (@UN_News_Centre) September 4, 2026
Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator published his projection in 1569 for sailors.
A flat chart cannot keep area, shape and direction all true at once. Mercator kept compass bearings as straight lines so a course could be plotted with a ruler.
This came at the cost of scale on the Mercator maps, where land stretches as you move away from the equator.
Greenland can thus look as large as Africa, while the continent is about 14 times larger. Antarctica also appears much larger than it is.
That geometry made Europe and North America look heavier than they are, while equatorial continents look slighter.
Left-wing activists and some African officials claimed the Mercator maps had a colonial bias that taught generations Africa was peripheral.
Moky Makura, executive director of Africa No Filter, told Reuters the current map was “the world’s longest misinformation and disinformation campaign”. Her group launched the “Correct the Map” drive with Speak Up Africa in April 2025 and the African Union endorsed it in August 2025.
Aware of this political background, the US mission called the resolution an “ideological agenda” and a distraction from peace and prosperity, the UN’s core mission.
Washington has already cut its funding to the UN, forcing severe job cuts and budget shrinkage at the UN refugee agency.
Ukraine’s abstention was not about Africa. Its UN envoy Andriy Melnyk said Kyiv could not back a text promoting maps that shade occupied Crimea differently from the rest of Ukraine.
The European Union voted in favour. Speaking for the bloc, Ireland said the measure concerned the relative size of landmasses alone and had no bearing on sovereignty, territorial status or recognised borders.
Africa covers about 30 million square kilometres, making it larger than Europe, North America, South America, Antarctica or Australia, and second only to Asia, at about 44.6 million.
Equal-area maps make that obvious. They also shrink Europe toward its true footprint of roughly 10 million square kilometres.
Google made a 3D globe its desktop default in 2018 though Mercator still opens its mobile app.
Some have noted that a map which shows a vast Africa next to a compact Europe sits uneasily beside arguments that Europe can absorb large, continuous inflows from the south.
Africa’s population is about 1.6 billion and still rising fast; Europe’s is smaller and ageing. Speak Up Africa says that within a generation one in four people on Earth will be African, a demographic weight it argues the old map hides.
No, the Mercator projection is not some kind of colonial conspiracy to make some countries look bigger than others
No you were not "lied to" for 400 years
It's just difficult to accurately represent a globe on a 2D map, and there are different ways to do it
That's all pic.twitter.com/OEJwUOgiV7
— Neil Stone (@DrNeilStone) September 6, 2026
