The United States has apologised after a State Department presentation at an international HIV/AIDS conference featured an inaccurate map of Africa that wrongly identified Nigeria and five other countries.
The presentation was delivered by a senior US official overseeing the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), Washington’s flagship global HIV programme.
The map, used during a presentation on Washington’s HIV funding programmes at a conference in Brazil on Sunday, showed Nigeria as a landlocked country and incorrectly placed several African nations.
The image also displayed distorted shapes of the affected countries, with Nigeria, Mozambique and Ivory Coast wrongly positioned. Malawi and Uganda were roughly placed correctly but appeared misshapen, while Cameroon was mentioned without its name being linked to a country on the map.
The error came to light after HIV/AIDS expert Emily Bass shared a photograph of the slide on her Substack newsletter, prompting criticism online.
An analysis by Reuters found that the image contained an artificial intelligence watermark, indicating it may have been created using AI tools.
The State Department later described the incident as an “unfortunate error,” saying a team member had “hurriedly altered” the slide deck before the event.
In a statement issued on Friday, a spokesperson said the department took “full responsibility for the confusion and misrepresentation it caused for attendees, including our African partners.”
Since President Donald Trump took office again, the State Department has significantly cut its global health funding and underwent a restructuring which has seen a significant number of career experts lose their jobs.
Cameron Hudson, a former State Department and NSC official on Africa, said that the mistake is “a reflection of what happens when you fire ⅓ of the State Department, eliminate multiple layers of bureaucracy and have too junior staff performing work under-supervised.”
“There isn’t just a cost savings when eviscerating staff and expertise. There’s a real cost in reputation and effectiveness,” he posted on X. “I suspect many people don’t actually care because they say it’s Africa, but the same thing is happening with teams trying to negotiate nuclear deals with Iran. That should concern everyone.”
“What an embarrassment. This is what happens when [the State Department] fires career experts and tries to have AI conduct diplomacy,” Democrat and ranking member of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee Senator Jeanne Shaheen wrote on X.