State Department Mislabels Every Country on Map of Africa at Global Conference

Honest, paywall-free news is rare. Please support our boldly independent journalism with a donation of any size. The U.S. State Department presented a map of Africa at a global AIDS conference this week in which every country was mislabelled and its borders jumbled. The map, as first reported by Substack writer and AIDS expert Emily Bass and confirmed by Reuters, “caused a stir” when it was presented by a top official from the foreign affairs agency. The graphic shows an outline of Africa with six areas highlighted, and lines that match the areas to the supposed country names. Next to the country names are figures indicating potential grant amounts. But what is labelled as “Nigeria” is actually a nondescript blob that seemingly encompasses areas of Mali, Niger, and Algeria. The shape labelled “Mozambique” looks more like a portion of Ethiopia. The State Department’s version of “Côte D’Ivoire” has been moved from West Africa to East Africa, and Cameroon seemingly didn’t even get a corresponding line, though one area without a label is situated in what is actually Côte D’Ivoire. The only two countries vaguely in the right areas are Malawi and Uganda, though the area labelled Malawi is still in the wrong area and Uganda seems to have usurped part of Kenya. Reuters reported that the map bears an AI watermark that signals that it was made with OpenAI. That would explain why the map’s labels and borders are so wrong, and some of the strange formatting choices, but not why the State Department wouldn’t have looked over the presentation before presenting it on a global stage. The State Department said: “We take full responsibility for the confusion and misrepresentation it caused for attendees, including our African partners.” The incident is an embarrassing affair for a country already under scrutiny for its foreign policy choices and often careless attitude toward global problems. The future of the AIDS conference, held this year in Rio de Janeiro, is already questionable due to the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts to humanitarian efforts to combat the deadly virus. For years, HIV infections, which are most common in Africa, have been on the decline globally, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention assessed in 2023 that the world was on track to eliminate the AIDS epidemic by 2030. But a recent UN report found that that goal is now in jeopardy as a result of funding cuts. Between 2024 and 2025, funding for HIV response dropped by 25 percent, or $2.1 billion dollars. This was largely driven by the U.S. slashing $2.1 billion in spending that year, after the Trump administration and Elon Musk made deep cuts to the U.S.’s PEPFAR program. This program has been credited with saving over 26 million lives since 2003 with initiatives like testing, the distribution of antiretroviral treatments, and preventing infection from parent-to-child, among other things. If these cuts were made permanent, the UNAIDS agency finds, they could cause an additional 6.6 million HIV infections between 2025 and 2029 and an additional 4.2 million AIDS-related deaths in that same time. This would cause an additional 3 million children to be orphaned, the agency finds. The map error also comes as the State Department is seeking to effectively upend the world order. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced earlier this month that the Trump administration is working to dismantle the International Criminal Court (ICC), while the U.S. has imposed sanctions on members of the body and certain UN officials and sought to establish its own version of international law. Rubio has touted to foreign leaders that the U.S. has entered a “new era” in which international law should be sidelined in order to usher in a new age of Western “dominance.” Media that fights fascism Truthout is funded almost entirely by readers — that’s why we can speak truth to power and cut against the mainstream narrative. But independent journalists at Truthout face mounting political repression under Trump. We rely on your support to survive McCarthyist censorship. Please make a tax-deductible one-time or monthly donation.