State Department Map Labels Every African Country Wrong at Conference

The State Department is having some trouble identifying states.

At the annual International AIDS Conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, this week, the U.S. State Department unveiled a map of the African continent with every single country mislabeled. Nigeria drifted into the Sahara Desert, landlocked and lost; Mozambique was relocated to the eastern Horn of Africa; and the Ivory Coast, somehow, found itself nowhere near a coast. The map also included a country with no name, while Cameroon, dutifully included in the list of countries, got no real estate on the map at all.

The map was revealed about halfway through a presentation about the State Department’s new international health agreements. It was supposed to depict opportunities for Annual Program Statements by country in Africa, as part of the implementation process for remaining AIDS prevention programming after President Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency dismantled USAID last year. According to an analysis by Reuters, the map contained an artificial intelligence watermark which identified it as made by OpenAI.

Presentation attendees—including high-level officials representing several of the mislabeled countries—took screenshots of the map and posted them online. Photos posted by journalist and AIDS expert Emily Bass were shared across LinkedIn, with one post garnering about 40,000 views, Reuters reports.

“The U.S. 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,” Bass wrote on Substack. “As this session made clear in so many ways, the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Global Health Security and Diplomacy is redrawing the map and rewriting history.”

Matt Petit, who focuses on geopolitics and AI at the Atlantic Council, called the map “beyond embarrassing” in a post on LinkedIn. “Whoever created and approved this slide did not know where countries in Africa are and did not care to check their work.”

In a statement following the presentation, the State Department claimed “full responsibility for the confusion and misrepresentation it caused for attendees, including our African partners.” It went on to blame a staff member for hastily changing the slide deck before the session began. Despite the embarrassing moment, the department said it remains “committed to fighting AIDS.”

Maybe a map that can’t identify a single African country says more about America’s AIDS diplomacy than a briefing ever could. ...