Togo’s Foreign Minister Robert Dussey announced Saturday that his country will become the first nation to revise its geography textbooks to reflect more accurate map projections, a concrete implementation step following a United Nations vote to move away from the Mercator projection.
The resolution passed with support from 164 nations, including France. Only the United States voted against it. Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Moldova, Serbia and Ukraine abstained.
The Mercator projection, a 16th-century cartographic standard originally designed for maritime navigation, has long distorted the relative sizes of continents. Africa and South America, which straddle the equator, appear considerably smaller than they actually are, while Russia, North America and Greenland appear disproportionately large. The distortion intensifies the further a region lies from the equator, creating a visual hierarchy that has shaped global perception for centuries.
Togo spearheaded the initiative, leading an African Union campaign to limit the use of Mercator projections and promote alternative mapping systems. The resolution is not legally binding, but it represents a coordinated push by African states to counter perceptions that the continent occupies a marginal position in global affairs.
What the resolution actually requires: governments, schools, international organisations and technology companies are asked to adopt the Equal Earth projection and other equal-area maps where accurate continental scale matters. It stops well short of an outright ban. A statement from the Togolese ministry confirmed that the measure “in no way challenges the use of the Mercator projection for maritime and aerial navigation, for which it remains fully suited.”
France’s Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot illustrated the scale of the problem plainly. “Greenland appears almost as large as Africa, whereas Africa is actually about 14 times larger,” he said, adding that the United States, Russia and China take on disproportionate visual importance compared with Africa, Latin America or South-East Asia under the current system.
Dussey outlined a six-month timeline for the next phase. Togo plans to engage other African Union member states and supporters from other regions to develop a coordinated adoption strategy. He stressed that discussions must include companies operating mapping, GPS and other location-based technologies, given that digital platforms now shape how most people encounter maps in practice.
The United States delegation objected, characterizing the resolution as promoting an ideological agenda and describing it as “a distraction from the genuine problems of international peace, prosperity or good relations.” That position left the United States alone among major powers in opposition.
Dussey framed the resolution in terms that extended beyond the technical. “This decision is about much more than cartography,” he wrote on social media after the vote. “It is about justice, dignity, equality and the way we represent our world.” Addressing the African Group at the UN, he was direct about the campaign’s aims: “Africa is not asking for preferential treatment. Africa is asking that its reality, aspirations and contribution to the international system be duly taken into account.”
Barrot connected France’s decision to a longer argument about how embedded cartographic distortions shape geopolitical perception over time. “Distortions eventually take root in perceptions. The time has come to correct them,” he said. “Changing the map obviously does not change the world. But correcting a distorting representation is already an act of truth.”
Whether technology companies, school systems and international organisations move quickly to update their materials, or treat the non-binding resolution as easy to defer, will determine how much the vote translates into actual change on classroom walls and digital screens.