What’s in a map? For most people, perhaps location, direction and a way of understanding how one place relates to another. But if you are African, there is now a bigger question: what happens when the map the world has used for generations has made your continent appear smaller than it really is?
That might sound like a cartographic technicality. But maps do more than show us where places are. They shape how we understand scale, distance and, in subtle ways, importance. When a continent as large and diverse as Africa is consistently represented out of proportion, the issue becomes not only one of geography, but also of perception.
It is in this context that the recent UN backing for the Correct the Map campaign matters. The resolution aims to correct a distortion that has shaped how generations have seen the continent in relation to the rest of the world.
I came across a LinkedIn post from Moky Makura, founder of Africa No Filter and one of the leading voices and drivers behind the #CorrectTheMap campaign, reflecting on how the change came about. As she put it, the starting point was simple: “The map was diminishing Africa.” Recognising the problem was one thing, but getting people to understand why it mattered was more important. An issue that could easily have been dismissed as symbolic grew into a much broader conversation about how Africa is seen and represented, eventually earning the backing of 164 countries at the United Nations.
That journey says something important about our profession as “Strategic Communications experts’’. I was reminded of it recently at Africa PR Week in Nairobi, Kenya. Across several conversations, one theme kept returning – Africa’s narrative is still too often framed elsewhere, and too often through a limited set of lenses. Conflict, risk, aid and instability. These realities exist, but they are not the whole continent. They sit alongside investment, innovation, regional trade, entrepreneurship, cultural influence and communities solving difficult problems every day.
For me, that raises an important reflection about our role as African communicators. Many of us are not only telling stories to audiences at home; we are representing African businesses, institutions and ideas to the rest of the world. That means the way we frame those stories matters. We have the context, proximity and understanding to explain the continent in a way that is fuller, more accurate and more grounded in how Africa actually works, grows and changes.
A client once put this into perspective for me while discussing development work and funding they receive for Africa: “We are getting money to build our own countries.” That stayed with me. Behind the press releases, LinkedIn posts, speeches and reports our job is not simply to report activity. It is to make the significance of that activity understood.
And maybe that is why the Africa map conversation should not end with a new projection or a policy win. It should push us to think more broadly about how we present the continent – in its scale, complexity, ambition and progress. That does not mean manufacturing positive stories or overlooking the challenges that exist. It means resisting narrow frames and telling a fuller story, particularly when we are representing African businesses, institutions and ideas to audiences around the world.
Correcting the map will not solve Africa’s development challenges. But that does not make it trivial. Again, Moky put it best – “a resolution only matters if it changes the maps people actually see.” The same is true of narrative change. Conferences, campaigns and conversations matter only if they eventually change the stories, images and assumptions that travel beyond the room.
As an African communications professional, I feel a responsibility to tell these stories thoroughly and clearly. Part of that comes from understanding the continent’s markets, cultures, contradictions and ambitions in ways that cannot always be captured from a distance. That gives us an opportunity to communicate with evidence, challenge lazy narratives, show scale and impact, and ensure African voices are present when Africa is being defined.
Perhaps that is what is really in a map: not only geography, but perspective. And if the world has spent generations seeing Africa as smaller than it is, we should make sure we do not communicate it that way too.
