The State Department issued an apology after mislabeling every country on a map of Africa presented at a pre-conference in Rio de Janeiro ahead of the AIDS 2026 conference.
The error is all the more embarrassing because high-level African officials were in the audience. Emily Bass, an expert consultant for Physicians for Human Rights, who writes about the Trump administration’s global health agenda on her Substack, said the map could not have been any more incorrect.
She wrote:
“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.)”
In a statement to HuffPost, the State Department said it took “full responsibility for the confusion and misrepresentation, including our African partners.” A department spokesperson said another member of the team had “hastily altered the slide deck immediately before the presentation.”
Adding to the controversy, a Reuters analysis found that the map shown in the presentation contained an artificial intelligence watermark indicating it had been created using OpenAI tools. The company said it was investigating the matter.
Images of the map went viral, sparking outrage.
The presentation was given by Jeff Graham, the senior U.S. official overseeing PEPFAR, the flagship American HIV/AIDS relief program. He did not respond to requests for comment. Despite criticism surrounding the presentation, the State Department maintained that the conference produced meaningful discussions and said the U.S. remains committed to fighting HIV/AIDS.
Last year’s funding pause temporarily disrupted aid efforts worldwide, but many of the program’s most critical services have resumed. Even so, the administration has narrowed its financial support by cutting prevention and surveillance programs and intends to eventually end PEPFAR’s operations in South Africa.
