Eleven of the 20 fastest-growing economies in the world this year are African. A continent generating that much growth cannot be treated as a footnote to anyone else’s agenda.
It has been drawn as one all the same. This month, 164 governments voted to replace the Mercator projection with Equal Earth, showing Africa at its true scale. Togo introduced the resolution on behalf of the African Group, following the African Union Assembly’s adoption of the item in February. It passed with one vote against and six abstentions.
What interests me here is not the map.
Mercator was drawn in 1569 for navigators who needed straight compass bearings. Its distortion of landmass is a trade-off, not an error. Africa appears roughly the size of Greenland; it is actually about fourteen times larger. The correction was available for centuries. What changed this year was not the mathematics. It was the authorship.
For most of the modern era, this continent’s story has been written for us-sympathetically at times, expertly at times, but elsewhere. Aid appeals, risk ratings, documentary voiceovers: each a projection with a purpose, unquestioned long enough to feel like geography.
This time, a member state moved an instrument through a continental body into a global chamber and carried it 164 to 1. Seven months from Addis Ababa to New York.
As governments convene for the UN General Assembly this week, Africa owes itself a hard conversation: what are we going to move next?
The uncomfortable part of this victory should be named by us. The resolution recommends. It does not bind. We have proved we can win the free votes. The discipline now required is to spend the same coordination on those that carry a price.
Twenty-one years ago, at Ezulwini and Sirte, Africa agreed on a common position on the Security Council: two permanent seats with all the prerogatives of permanent membership, including the veto, and five non-permanent seats. Fifty-five states, one position, no drift in two decades.
Yet reform has not moved. The Intergovernmental Negotiations have run since 2009 without a negotiating text delegations are obliged to work from. In 2024, the Pact for the Future committed the membership to redressing Africa’s historical injustice as a priority.
Our case has been good for 21 years. Are we prepared to run the Council file as Togo ran the map file: a named mover, a coordinated bloc, a tabled instrument, a date? Council reform requires two-thirds of the membership and ratification by all five permanent members.
Expensive is not impossible. We have never lacked the argument. We have lacked the instrument and the deadline.
The G20 tells a similar story. The African Union took its seat in 2023. South Africa held the presidency and hosted the summit in 2025. A seat and a gavel inside three years is a serious institutional result.
But a seat is an address, not a position. What is the continental ask now that the gavel has gone? Who is drafting it? Against whose measures is it scored? If our agenda moves only when an African state holds the presidency, what we have is access. Presence without a standing ask is simply attendance, easy to grant and easy to ignore.
This matters to my own field. Decisions that set the price of nature-how biodiversity is financed, whether ecosystem services are valued as assets or treated as charity, what a sovereign pays to borrow-reach far beyond environment ministries. They are shaped in the G20 and the international financial institutions. A continent under-represented where such decisions are made will be undervalued, however accurately it is drawn.
The next ask should be large and expensive, and our tolerance for a long, contested negotiation must match it. We will be told no more than once.
Globally, roughly 30 times more money is spent destroying nature than protecting it, according to the UN Environment Programme’s State of Finance for Nature reporting. This is why the language of sovereign wealth matters.
Africans are not incidental occupants of a valuable landscape. We are its custodians, and custodianship is expertise: knowing what a watershed does for a city four hundred kilometres downstream, what a migration corridor means to a herd and the economy it feeds, which soils recover after a bad year and which never do.
A standing forest, an intact rangeland, a functioning river basin are sovereign assets. The nations holding them are owed what any asset holder is owed. Not gratitude. Not conditionality. The ordinary presumption that what you hold is worthwhile and that you have a say in how it is used.
The map is corrected. We will be shown at the size we have always been. Being seated at the weight we have always carried is a separate negotiation-and unlike the map, it will not be free.