164 Countries Back UN Push to Correct How Africa Appears on World Maps

For centuries, the world map most people grew up with has distorted the true size of entire continents. Africa, in particular, appears far smaller than it really is under the traditional Mercator projection, while Europe, North America and Greenland are visually enlarged.

Now, a United Nations resolution is pushing for that imbalance to be addressed. The non-binding “Correct the Map” resolution, introduced by Togo on behalf of the African Group and backed by the African Union, passed by 164 votes to one, with the United States casting the only opposing vote and six countries abstaining.

The resolution does not ban the Mercator projection, which still has practical uses in navigation. Instead, it encourages institutions to use more accurate representations of continental size where geography, education and public understanding are the priority.

The debate is about more than cartography. Supporters argue that distorted maps have helped shape generations of assumptions about Africa, including how people understand its population, resources and place in the world. A map may look neutral, but the way the world is drawn can influence the way the world is understood.

The Map Changes How We See Africa

To understand why the debate matters, look closely at the world map most of us grew up with. Africa often appears roughly comparable in size to Europe. In reality, the difference is enormous. Africa covers more than 30 million square kilometres, making it almost three times the size of Europe. Yet the Mercator projection stretches northern countries and regions as they approach the poles, making areas near the equator appear comparatively smaller.

That distortion can produce some surprising comparisons. The distance across Africa from its western edge towards the Horn of Africa is greater than many east-to-west journeys across Europe, even when the conventional world map gives the opposite impression.

This is where the argument stops being purely about cartography. Maps help shape our mental picture of the world. If Africa repeatedly appears smaller than it really is, it becomes easier to underestimate the scale of its land, agricultural potential, population capacity and natural resources.

Those ideas also feed the claim that Africa has too many people. Prince William has echoed that view several times, warning that population growth is putting Africa’s wildlife and habitats under “enormous pressure.” Critics argue that this kind of framing has racist roots because it treats African people as the problem while giving far less attention to colonial exploitation, land loss and the extraction of the continent’s resources.

But Africa’s population cannot be understood simply by looking at the raw number of people living there. The continent is home to roughly 1.5 billion people spread across more than 30 million square kilometres. China has a population of a similar scale within less than one-third of Africa’s land area. Debates about African population growth often focus on Nigeria, yet the Netherlands has more than twice Nigeria’s population density.

None of this means population growth creates no challenges. Rapid growth can place enormous pressure on housing, schools, healthcare, infrastructure and employment when governments cannot expand services quickly enough. But that is very different from arguing that Africa is poor because it has somehow run out of land or resources.

The continent contains vast reserves of oil, natural gas, critical minerals, agricultural land and freshwater. At the same time, many countries that produce resources essential to the global economy remain among those receiving the smallest share of the wealth generated from them.

That contradiction raises a different question. Instead of asking whether Africa has too many people, perhaps the more important question is why a continent with so much land, so many resources and such extraordinary economic potential has historically retained so little of the value extracted from it.

That question leads far beyond the shape of a map. It leads into slavery, colonialism, resource extraction, industrialisation and the economic structures that continued after formal colonial rule ended.

And that is why supporters of the effort to redraw the world map argue that correcting Africa’s size is not simply cosmetic. It challenges one of the most basic visual assumptions that generations have used to understand the continent.