There are two ways to make Africa smaller. You draw it smaller, or you teach the world to look at it that way, and that’s precisely what the Mercator map – which you will find on most office walls and in countless atlases – has done.

This may not have been deliberate, but it’s been effective.

On September 4, the UN decided the picture needed correcting, voting 164 to one, with six abstentions. The sole dissenter was Donald Trump’s America. It would be interesting to have coffee with him and ask why he thought it fit for the US to go against the grain.

The resolution, introduced by Togo on behalf of the Africa Group, which comprises 54 African countries and functions as a regional negotiating and voting bloc at the UN, seeks to encourage governments, schools, international organisations and technology companies to use equal-area projections – particularly Equal Earth – where the relative size of continents matters.

Owing to the widespread use of the Mercator map, Africa has been living with a picture of itself that is, literally, smaller than reality.

Perhaps we should start with Greenland, which covers about 2.17-million square kilometres, compared with Africa’s 30.3-million square kilometres, yet on the Mercator projection appears to be more or less the same size as Africa. In fact, Africa is large enough to contain China, India, the US and Argentina – whose combined area is about 25.5-million square kilometres – with about five-million square kilometres still available. You wouldn’t have the slightest clue from looking at the Mercator map.

The distortion arises because the Mercator projection stretches the Earth’s surface progressively as it moves away from the Equator. Thus, distortion is relatively limited at the Equator but becomes increasingly extreme towards the poles, making land masses at higher latitudes appear much larger than they actually are, with those closer to the Equator appearing relatively smaller.

Before we accuse Gerardus Mercator, the Flemish cartographer who died in 1594 and was the brains behind the widely used map, of a colonial conspiracy, there is a historical fact to deal with. His famous projection, introduced in 1569, was designed principally for navigation. For sailors, it was a brilliant solution to a difficult problem. A Mercator chart preserves angles and represents lines of constant compass bearing as straight lines, making it enormously useful for plotting courses across the oceans.

Mercator was solving a maritime challenge. The problem arose when a map designed to show sailors how to get to a particular destination became a map that schoolchildren, politicians and the rest of us use to show what the world looks like.

But Africans didn’t wake up in the twenty-first century and suddenly discover that somebody had made their continent smaller. German historian Arno Peters was making precisely that complaint in 1973, when his equal-area projection set off a cartographic war that raged for years and that he eventually lost. However, the argument refused to disappear.

The difference now is that Africans have organised behind the argument and taken it beyond cartographic academia, with the campaign driven by Africa No Filter and Speak Up Africa, two African organisations that decided this was no longer for geographers to settle over coffee. They launched Correct the Map, calling for the adoption of the Equal Earth projection in schools, newsrooms, international organisations and digital platforms.

The campaign was endorsed by the African Union (AU) in 2025. This year, the AU Assembly went further, adopting a decision calling for more accurate representation of Africa in global maps, geospatial systems, media and educational curricula. Togo was then put into the driving seat and in turn escalated the matter to the UN, where the Africa Group carried the argument into the General Assembly on September 4.

The campaigners for a more accurate map claim that distorted geography has not only skewed perception but also created a false reference point for economic, political and development decisions. Speak Up Africa has gone so far as to argue that underestimating Africa’s scale can contribute to underestimating the reach of problems such as malaria and neglected tropical diseases and, ultimately, to underinvestment.

The UN vote, then, does not put money into the treasuries of African countries. Its intended payoff is to change the reference point before the money is allocated, the policy is written, the lesson is taught or the investment decision is made.