Eight years ago this month, The Murphy Center started this weekly column. The first article I wrote for publication in The Brunswick News was titled “Economic development requires involving the community.” A recent international news story reminded me of a personal experience that has deeply shaped my belief in doing development right, which still means the same thing it did 8 years ago— consider and involve as many community stakeholders as possible.
The news story was about the African Union’s endorsement of efforts to stop governments’ and international organizations’ use of the Mercator map of the world.
The Mercator Map, named for the Flemish cartographer who created it in 1569, features parallel lines of longitude, and lines of latitude that are parallel but spaced wider and wider as they diverge from the equator. The Mercator map was popular with early navigators because its design allowed them to preserve angles when plotting a course. The maps’ popularity spread into classrooms and to other uses, and these maps have been some of the most widely used world maps for centuries.
There is no perfect map. It is impossible to represent our round Earth as a flat map without some distortion. But there are different methods of translating round to flat, each with merits and drawbacks.
Unfortunately, when you build a map the way Mercator did, you stretch features near the Earth’s poles and shrink features nearer the Equator. Thus, while the map may be useful for navigation, it is essentially useless for understanding what the Earth really looks like. One alternative, preferred by the African Union, is the Equal Earth Projection map, which better reflects countries’ true sizes.
And it matters. I learned first-hand how much it matters when I was a graduate student interning in West Africa.
I was living in the rural town of Saclepea, Liberia, with a small team conducting research to inform our American organization’s economic development efforts in the area. One of our team members brought with them a load of supplies donated by charitable Americans. Among these supplies were paper maps intended for distribution in Saclepea’s schools.
One of our school-aged Liberian friends found the maps among our things before we distributed them, and as he examined the map of the world, he commented, “No wonder Africa will never be great. Look how much smaller we are than America.”
His words hit hard. I knew this perception was far from the truth. In fact, approximately 30 world countries, including big ones like the U.S., China, and India, could fit inside the continent of Africa. But I had never considered how common maps distorted Earth’s proportions nor how those distortions affected the belief systems of children around the world.
I advocated that my team not distribute these maps. It had become clear to me that they negatively shaped the lens through which children view themselves in relation to the rest of the world. Surely, the good people who donated the maps had been just as ignorant as I about their potential negative effects. Nevertheless, my team leader rebuked me and insisted that we must distribute the maps to honor the Americans who had worked hard to secure them for Liberian schools. It was the wrong move. It was a classic example of what Atlanta minister Bob Lupton would call “toxic charity” or what Development Economists Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert warn against in their book When Helping Hurts.
That experience started my low-key map obsession, and still, it shapes how I think about, teach, and participate in economic development. I have non-Mercator maps in my office and at home as reminders that true and lasting economic development must always put the needs of the communities being served above the desires of those serving.
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Dr. Melissa Trussell is a professor in the School of Business and Public Management at College of Coastal Georgia who works with the college’s Reg Murphy Center for Economic and Policy Studies. Contact her at mtrussell@ccga.edu. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the College of Coastal Georgia.
Reg Murphy Center