A Fair Map for a Fair World: Why the UN's "Correct the Map" Resolution Matters

 By Anna Miti

On 5 September 2026, the United Nations General Assembly voted to change how the world sees Africa. By 164 votes to one, with six abstentions, member states adopted the "Correct the Map" resolution, put forward by Togo on behalf of the African Group and the African Union, and co-sponsored by the Bahamas. It calls on governments, schools, media houses and tech companies to move away from the Mercator projection, the default map in classrooms, textbooks and navigation apps, in favour of equal-area projections like Equal Earth, developed in 2018.

On the Mercator map, Africa looks about the same size as Greenland. In reality, it is fourteen times larger, big enough to hold the United States, China, India, Japan and most of Europe combined, with room to spare. The projection was designed in the 16th century to help European sailors cross oceans. The Mercator map was designed in 1569 by the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator to help European explorers navigate across the world. The distortion of his map is a result of the fact that it is impossible to accurately represent the surface of a globe on a two-dimensional chart.

The Mercator map accommodates the curvature of the Earth by making countries near the equator seem smaller than they are, with countries nearer the poles appearing larger. In an effort to address this, a team of cartographers in 2018 created an equal-area map they called the Equal Earth projection.

In February, the AU's 54 member states adopted it and said it "more accurately represents the sizes of all continents, particularly Africa". Although the resolution is not binding and bans nothing, it is a statement of intent, and the first step towards correcting a lie and injustice that has stood for 457 years.

Why a map is never just a map

Reactions online have been mixed, and sometimes dismissive. Some called the resolution a waste of time that changes nothing. Others said the UN has bigger problems to worry about. But this resolution is not just symbolic housekeeping. Symbols have meaning and show intent. Symbols are also the basis in which perception is built, and perception shapes policy, investment, and imagination long before any treaty does.

A child who spends twelve years looking at a map where Africa is no bigger than Greenland learns something that has nothing to do with geography, that Africa is small, peripheral, an afterthought. That lesson does not stay in the classroom. It shows up in newsrooms that treat fifty-four countries as one undifferentiated crisis zone. It shows up in boardrooms deciding where to place a factory or a clinical trial. It shows up in the rooms where global bodies decide whose voice carries weight. Correcting the map, as its backers put it, is an act of "cognitive justice." Repeat a distortion for long enough, and it starts to feel like fact. Cognitive justice is the work of prying the two apart again.

The resolution is also a Pan-Africanist question.  Africa has the right to determine how it is seen and should not accept distortion, however small it looks. Just as Zimbabweans would not accept a lie about who built Great Zimbabwe, we should not accept a lie about the size of our continent either.

Colonial cartography (the art, science, and technology of making and studying maps) was never neutral. It was drawn by the powerful, for the powerful, and it built a hierarchy of importance into the shape of the world. Reclaiming an accurate map is part of the same project as reclaiming accurate data, the first step toward Africa's story being told at its true scale, not the scale that suited someone else four and a half centuries ago.

African nations now have a responsibility to make sure this moment does not end at the map's edge. An accurate map means little hanging in a classroom that still teaches African history as a footnote to Europe's, or a newsroom that still tells African stories through non-African eyes. Correcting the map should be the opening move towards correcting injustices and towards decolonization.

UN Correct the Map resolution