The United Nations General Assembly has adopted an African-backed resolution urging wider use of world maps that represent continents more accurately, in a diplomatic victory for Togo and the African Union.
The resolution, sponsored by Togo on behalf of the African Group, was approved in New York on Friday by 164 votes to one, with six abstentions, according to The Guardian.
The United States voted against it, describing the measure as unnecessary. Known as “Correct the Map,” the initiative challenges the continued dominance of the 16th-century Mercator projection.
Designed primarily to aid maritime navigation, the projection preserves angles and directions but substantially enlarges landmasses nearer the poles while shrinking regions around the Equator.
The distortion is especially visible in comparisons between Africa and Greenland. On many Mercator maps, the two landmasses appear similar in size, although Africa is roughly 14 times larger than Greenland.
Africa covers about 30 million square kilometres and is the world’s second -largest continent by area.
Togo’s campaign has promoted the Equal Earth projection, developed in 2018 by cartographers Bojan Šavrič, Bernhard Jenny and Tom Patterson.
Equal Earth is an equal-area projection, meaning that it preserves the relative size of regions more faithfully than Mercator, although—as with all flat maps of the globe—it introduces other compromises in shape, distance or direction.
The African Union Commission welcomed the vote in a statement issued by its chairperson, Mahmoud Ali Youssouf, who praised Togolese President Faure Essozimna Gnassingbé and the African Group’s mobilisation at the United Nations.
The AU said the resolution was not merely about cartographic technique but also about how Africa is perceived in education, publishing, technology and international institutions.
Supporters argue that maps influence public understanding of geography and can reinforce assumptions about which regions are large, central or globally important.
Advocacy groups Africa No Filter and Speak Up Africa have framed the campaign as part of a broader effort to challenge inherited stereotypes and promote a more accurate representation of Africa’s demographic, economic and geopolitical significance.
The resolution is not legally binding, however. It does not compel governments, schools, publishers or technology companies to abandon Mercator maps, and it does not prohibit their use for navigation or other purposes for which the projection remains useful.
Instead, it encourages institutions to consider equal-area or other scientifically appropriate projections according to their needs.
That distinction may prove important. Cartographers generally agree that no single flat map can preserve every geographic property at once.
Equal-area projections improve comparisons of landmass size, while conformal projections such as Mercator are valuable for navigation because they preserve local angles and bearings.
The practical impact of the UN vote will therefore depend on whether national education systems, publishers, mapping companies and international organisations voluntarily adopt alternatives.
Togo has said it intends to work with UNESCO, the AU and technology companies on implementation discussions in Lomé next year.
For Africa, the resolution is both a technical intervention and a symbolic one: an attempt to ensure that the continent’s physical scale is not obscured by a map designed for a different age and purpose.
“Africa must be represented as it truly is: in its true dimensions and in its rightful place in the world,” the AU Commission said.
