Jimmy Carter

Former US President, Jimmy Carter, a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and founder of the Carter Centre, has revealed that his next big agenda will be on abuse of women and children globally.

In an interview he granted National Geographic magazine, published in the October 2015 edition, Carter, now 90, who announced on 12 August that he was diagnosed with cancer, said that his Centre would focus on the horrible abuse of women and kids around the world. In his words: “Many are strangled at birth by their parents or aborted when a fetus is determined to be female. Some 70 per cent of people sold across international borders now are females, to be sold into sexual slavery. One out of five college freshmen girls can expect to be sexually assaulted before they graduate. This crime is seldom investigated in our country and it also exists in our military. These are things on which the Carter Centre will focus a lot of our attention in future years.”

He said he was proud of the Centre’s achievements in the area of health. As he put it: “One, we have the only international task force on disease eradication. We settled on guinea worm and found it in 23,700 villages. Since then, we have reduced the number of cases from 3.6 million to 126.Second, we promote human rights in the form of democracy and freedom. By the end of this year, the carter Centre will probably have monitored more than a hundred elections to validate they are conducted honestly and safely.”

In fact, Nigeria too has been a beneficiary of the Centre. The World Health Organisation, in January last year, officially certified Nigeria as a Guinea Worm-Free Country.

On why he found the Carter Centre, the former American President told National Geographic that when he left the White House, he wanted to capitalise on his having been president of a great country. As he put it: “I thought about filling vacuums and things that governments didn’t do. The first concept we had was to negotiate peace agreements between people who wouldn’t be accepted by normal governments. That’s something we have continued through the years with the Maoists in Nepal, Kim 11 Sung in North Korea and Hamas and Fatah in the Palestinian community. Later, we filled other vacuums, including monitoring elections and dealing with neglected tropical diseases.”

The Carter Centre is a nonprofit public policy center founded in 1982 by Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter to fight disease, hunger, poverty, conflict, and oppression around the world