US State Department Apologises After Mislabeling Nigeria, Others on Africa Map

The US State Department has apologised after it mislabeled Nigeria and other African countries on a map of the continent that its officials shared at a meeting this week.

According to Reuters, which viewed a video of the presentation delivered at the AIDS 2026 conference in Rio de Janeiro, the map displayed midway through a presentation on the State Department’s new health agreements mislabeled every country on the African continent.

HuffPost reported that an expert consultant for Physicians for Human Rights, Emily Bass, who saw the presentation firsthand, described the litany of errors in a post titled To End A Plague … Again on her Substack, which focuses on the Trump administration’s global health agenda.

“The map mis-identified the locations of Cote d’Ivoire, Mozambique, Nigeria by enormous margins—making Nigeria landlocked, Mozambique an east African nation and Cote d’Ivoire a southern African state. The map put Uganda and Malawi in the right vicinity, but with the wrong borders. And it nope’d out altogether for Cameroon, which doesn’t have a line connecting the name to a country at all. (There is also a country without a name. Alas, they are not a match.),” Bass wrote.

The State Department told HuffPost in a statement that it took “full responsibility for the confusion and misrepresentation, including our African partners.”

A spokesperson blamed the error on a team member “who hastily altered the slide deck immediately before the presentation.”

Reuters said its analysis of the map found that the image included an artificial intelligence watermark signalling it was created with OpenAI tools. The company said it was investigating the report.

The State Department maintained that it took full responsibility for the confusion caused.

Bass went on to lambast the broader state of U.S. diplomacy, saying, “Everyone makes mistakes,” Bass told HuffPost, “but the mislabeled map is symbolic of the very real and dangerous ways that the current leadership of the Bureau of Global Health Security and Diplomacy is rewriting history and ignoring evidence about the realities of the HIV response in Africa since the U.S. foreign aid transition began.”