Africa’s True Size: Why Correcting The World Map Matters For Farmers Too
The map on the classroom wall has barely changed in centuries. Greenland looms like a giant, Europe sits fat in the north, and Africa – home to more than a billion people and some of the world’s most fertile soils – looks strangely modest, not much bigger than an icy island with fewer people than Harare province.
On Friday, African diplomats will walk into the UN general assembly hall in New York trying to change that picture – literally. A Togo-sponsored resolution, backed by the African Union’s 55 member states, is asking the world to start phasing out the traditional Mercator projection in favour of a new map that shows Africa’s true scale.
If it passes, the vote will not redraw borders or feed a single household that went to bed hungry last night. Yet it strikes at something Africans – including farmers, seed breeders, extension officers, and policy-makers – live with every day: a world that consistently underestimates African space, African potential, and African voice.
What Exactly Is The UN Voting On?
Togo’s foreign affairs minister, Robert Dussey, says his country has tabled a resolution for the UN to adopt the 2018 Equal Earth map design as a standard equal-area reference and begin phasing out the dominance of the 1569 Mercator projection in global use.
Mercator’s map, created by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator to help sailors navigate, stretches the globe so that straight lines represent constant compass bearings. It works well for plotting sea routes. It works badly for showing comparative land size.
FFA Explainer:
The Mercator projection keeps angles true but distorts area. Regions near the equator, including most of Africa, appear much smaller than they really are. High-latitude areas, such as Europe, North America, and Greenland, appear far larger. Equal-area projections, like the Equal Earth map, do the opposite: they preserve true land area, so size comparisons are accurate, even if shapes look a little stretched.
That distortion has allowed generations of schoolchildren to grow up thinking Africa is only slightly larger than Greenland, when in reality the continent is about fourteen times bigger. Campaigners under the #CorrectTheMap banner like to illustrate it this way: you could fit the United States, China, India, Japan, Mexico, and much of Europe into Africa and still have space left.
UN resolutions are not binding. No one will march into a Zimbabwean Grade 5 class and rip down a Mercator map by force. But a yes vote would be a powerful political signal. It would tell textbook publishers, tech companies, development agencies, and school systems that the days of shrinking Africa on the wall should be coming to an end.
Why Has The Mercator Map Become So Controversial?
Historians and geographers have warned for years that the Mercator projection, while technically useful for navigation, carries heavy symbolic baggage.
Critics say it visually supports an old story: a big, important, well-defined north sitting on top of a smaller, hazy south. Activists have called this “cartographic colonialism” – the way maps themselves can reinforce a worldview where power, wealth, and knowledge flow from the north downwards.
Countries in Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia are placed near the equator, where Mercator shrinks land area. Countries in Europe and North America sit closer to the poles, where Mercator stretches everything. The result is a world where Britain looks the size of Zimbabwe, Scandinavia dwarfs west Africa, and Greenland seems to rival Africa itself.
German historian Arno Peters became one of the most famous critics when he promoted his alternative Gall–Peters projection in 1973, an equal-area map that gave the tropics back their true bulk. The Peters map has since appeared in classrooms and TV dramas alike as a symbol of “decolonised” geography.
The Equal Earth design that Togo is pushing is a newer, smoother version of that equal-area tradition, designed by an international team of cartographers in 2018. It preserves true land area while offering a visually pleasing shape of continents.
What Are African Countries Hoping To Achieve?
The African Union formally endorsed the #CorrectTheMap campaign in August 2025 and asked Togo to spearhead it at the UN. For many African diplomats, the vote is as much about symbolism and narrative as about lines on paper.
Togolese minister Robert Dussey insists the conversation is not about punishing anyone, but about aligning maps with science.
“This discussion is not a political discussion [but] a scientific discussion, because there is scientific proof so we all have to accept the reality,” he said.
Yet science and politics rarely travel alone. JJ Enoch, a London-based senior associate at JS Held, a geopolitical risk advisory firm, linked the push to a wider shift in Africa’s global stance.
He argued that the Mercator map visually diminishes Africa’s true scale and that adopting an equal-area map would not only provide a more accurate basis for education and public understanding, but also signal that Africa’s demographic, economic, and geopolitical weight can no longer be seen through inherited, distorted conventions.
For African governments that have spent the last decade demanding more say in institutions like the UN Security Council and the World Bank, the map vote is one more way of saying: stop treating us as small.
Why Should Farmers And Rural Communities Care?
On the surface, cartography belongs to lecture halls, not livestock pens. But the stories maps tell have a habit of flowing into budgets, research agendas, and the way outside partners “see” African land.
When a donor agency planner in Brussels, Washington, or Beijing glances at a Mercator-style world map on the wall, Africa does not just look physically smaller. It can feel like a narrower field of opportunity – a place of scarcity, fragility, and constraint, instead of a vast and varied continent where countries like Zimbabwe pack multiple agro-ecological zones, mineral belts, and trade corridors into one frame.
FFA Explainer:
Maps shape mindset. A map that shrinks Africa can subtly feed the idea that African markets are “niche”, that African land is mostly marginal, and that agricultural investment here is charity rather than smart business. An equal-area map restores a sense of scale: for land, for markets, and for the space to grow food, energy, and industry.
For smallholder farmers from Uzumba to Gokwe, nothing changes overnight if Mercator falls out of favour. Seeds still need rain, fertiliser still needs finance, cattle still need dipping. Yet the global narrative matters when:
- Investors decide where to put fertiliser plants or milling capacity,
- Researchers choose which crops and climates to study,
- Regional planners map out corridors for rail, irrigation, and energy, and
- Young Africans decide whether their future is in farming, tech, or a one-way ticket overseas.
Seeing Africa at its true size – including Zimbabwe’s long sweep from the Zambezi to the Limpopo – reinforces the idea that the continent is central to global food security, climate solutions, and markets. Not an afterthought sketched under Europe’s elbow.
How Does This Connect To Decolonising Education?
If the resolution passes, one of the biggest impacts could be in the classroom. UN backing would make it easier for education ministries and publishers to argue for new atlases, new wall maps, and new digital content.
Togo’s #CorrectTheMap campaign explicitly links the Equal Earth design to decolonising curricula – giving African pupils a view of the world where their continent dominates the centre not because of vanity, but because the numbers support it.
For Zimbabwe, which has been revising curricula under the competency-based framework and aligning content with NDS1 and AU Agenda 2063, the shift could dovetail with efforts to localise examples in geography, agriculture, and business studies.
Imagine a Form Two class in Gweru or Mutare being shown an Equal Earth projection and then asked to sketch how much land is actually available across Africa for solar farms, conservation agriculture, and grazing. Or being challenged to compare Zimbabwe’s true size to European states, and what that means for internal trade, irrigation potential, and regional grain markets.
That mental reset matters for the next generation of planners, agronomists, and agripreneurs. They will be less likely to think small if their map never lied to them about the size of their own continent.
What Happens If The Resolution Passes?
UN resolutions operate by influence, not enforcement. A successful #CorrectTheMap vote would nudge, not order. But those nudges add up.
Togolese authorities are already planning an implementation event in Lomé early next year with partners such as Unesco, the African Union, and technology brands like Google Maps. The idea is to translate a yes vote into concrete steps in education, digital mapping, and public communication.
Ghana’s recent success in steering a UN resolution that labelled the transatlantic slave trade the “gravest crime against humanity” has given African diplomats confidence that the map measure can also pass. In March, 123 states supported Ghana’s resolution, with only three voting against and 52 abstaining.
If Togo achieves something similar, classroom globes, school atlases, government briefing packs, and navigation apps could gradually shift to equal-area defaults. Mercator would not disappear entirely – it is still useful for certain navigation tasks – but it would stop being the map of everyday life.
Where Does Zimbabwe Fit Into This Story?
Zimbabwe is part of the African Union bloc backing the #CorrectTheMap campaign, and the debate speaks directly to the country’s long-running effort to reframe its own narrative in global forums.
On the ground, farmers already know that Zimbabwe is bigger than it looks on a European classroom map. Maize, tobacco, and cotton roll out across Mashonaland and the Midlands. Cattle graze from Matabeleland to Masvingo. Horticulture runs on irrigation schemes along the Save and Mazowe. Fish farms ring Lake Kariba and Tugwi-Mukosi.
Yet outside audiences still tend to imagine a small, landlocked state somewhere under South Africa. An equal-area map that shows Zimbabwe’s real footprint inside a truly scaled Africa supports a different kind of conversation – one where the country can talk about:
- Expanding irrigated wheat and soya as part of regional grain security,
- Hosting value chains that serve tens of millions of consumers across SADC,
- Developing solar and hydropower that feed into cross-border grids.
NDS1 situates Zimbabwe’s development inside AU Agenda 2063 and the UN SDGs. A corrected world map reinforces that integration visually, especially for younger citizens who will grow up with digital rather than paper atlases.
Beyond Lines On Paper, A Shift In Imagination
In Abidjan, where the Guardian’s report on the UN vote originated, diplomats talk about projections and resolutions. In Mberengwa or Chipinge, where a farmer eyes a sky heavy with both promise and risk, the conversation is about rainfall, prices, and whether the children will stay in agriculture.
Those worlds are more connected than they seem. A map that finally gives Africa its full breadth will not fix fertiliser shortages or mend broken roads. But it may help tilt the stories that textbooks tell, the slides that consultants show, and the mental models inside which global decisions about food, finance, and climate are made.
When Robert Dussey is asked why Togo is pushing this now, he replies simply: “Why not? When we look at the world map … it is time for us to change the narrative.”
For African farmers who have spent decades working within other people’s narratives – from colonial land maps to export crop charts – there is something quietly radical in that. It is a reminder that the first step in growing anything, whether a crop or a fairer global system, is deciding what shape the field really is.
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