The UN General Assembly approves a document calling for the use of a more accurate map to represent Africa

164 countries voted in favor of the document, while 6 other countries - Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Serbia, Lithuania and Estonia - abstained from voting.

This African initiative, presented by Togo with the support of the African Union, comes within the framework of the “CorrectTheMap” campaign, and aims to reduce reliance on the sixteenth-century Mercator projection, which is seen as reducing the size of Africa and the tropics compared to the land masses near the poles.

Before the vote, the US representative to the United Nations called for the document to be rejected in its entirety, saying that Washington did not consider the initiative a neutral attempt to correct cartographic distortions, but rather part of a broader “ideological agenda.”

The American side also pointed out that such decisions distract the United Nations from issues of international peace, prosperity, and relations between countries.

The “Equal Earth” projection, designed in 2018, is an alternative model that maintains the correct relative areas of the continents, reflecting, for example, that Africa is about 14 times larger than Greenland, contrary to what the Mercator projection suggests.

The decision is not mandatory, but it encourages governments, educational institutions, and technology companies to use more accurate maps when comparing areas.

The “Correct the Map” campaign collected about 11,000 signatures before the vote. The African Union had endorsed the campaign in August 2025, and asked Togo to lead efforts aimed at its adoption at the United Nations. The petition says: “As Africa becomes increasingly important in solving global challenges, it becomes necessary to represent its true scale.”

Historians and geographers have long argued that the Mercator map reflects Western assumptions about the world, while some activists have used the term "cartographic colonialism" to denounce what they described as the negative effects resulting from the way the map represents the sizes of continents and countries.