The US Department of State presented a map of Africa that mislabeled every nation on the continent that it attempted to highlight at the International AIDS Conference in Brazil this week.Nigeria, a vast country sitting on the Gulf of Guinea, was shown as a landlocked nation in the Sahara desert. Mozambique, whose Indian Ocean coastline stretches for more than 2,400km, was mislabeled as landlocked, too.Those were just two examples on a map that incorrectly identified every country of the six the department intended to highlight as “funding opportunities” for its health grants.
A screen shows a US government map of Africa with mislabeled countries during a US Department of State presentation at a global conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on Sunday.
Photographs and screenshots of the map quickly spread on social media.“The US government’s failure to catch this error before displaying the slide at the top international AIDS conference in the world, in a session that featured the director general of Nigeria as an invited guest, is not only disrespectful to African collaborators, it’s also a significant tell,” said Emily Bass, an AIDS expert who reported the error, wrote in a Substack post.
