By Abeer Al Fouti, Executive Director of Global Initiatives, Alwaleed Philanthropies
You almost certainly have never heard of Guinea worm disease. It doesn’t generate news headlines, is not often top of mind for global health experts, and does not attract large-scale funding for eradication efforts. Yet we are close to eliminating this devastating disease, with just a final effort required to make it gone for good. Learn more »
By Ambassador (ret.) Mary Ann Peters, chief executive officer
In 1982, President and Mrs. Carter created a new kind of post-presidential institution, not a think tank, but an organization acting to alleviate suffering and advance human rights for the world’s poorest people. Ever since, innovation has been part of the Center’s DNA. Learn more »
Human rights activists and scholars from 28 countries gathered at The Carter Center recently for the 12th Human Rights Defenders Forum. This year’s theme was “Building Solidarity toward Equality for All,” and topics included global protection for activists, challenges for women defenders and peacemakers, and the importance of mutually supporting civil, economic, political, and social rights. Defenders talked about their struggles and frustrations but also offered words of wisdom and hope. Learn more »
At a mobile surgery camp in Lotien, a village in South Sudan’s Eastern Equatoria region, a man requested surgery to help his son Lochin, age 11, who was suffering from trachomatous trichiasis (TT). After walking 245 kilometers (more than 150 miles) from their home, Lochin and his father arrived just before the temporary camp was nearing its end.
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When Dr. Moussa Saye was a boy, the rainy season brought great suffering to his village in the Bankass district of central Mali. “There were thousands of cases of Guinea worm in our village and other villages nearby,” he said. “There were whole families who couldn’t go to work. We called it ‘The Disease of No Food,’ because people couldn’t work in the fields and put away food.” Learn more »
In many parts of the world, repression is on the rise and freedom on the decline. But brave human rights defenders continue to fight for equality and fair treatment for all. Hear what participants in our Human Rights Defenders Forum have to say about the state of human rights across the globe. Learn what they’re doing to protect and promote these rights – and how you, too, can be a defender. Learn more »
Aisha Ahmed and Safi Inorano go about their daily tasks with holes in their hearts. While they work as cleaners on the U.N. base in Kidal, Mali, their daughters live with relatives hundreds of miles away in cities that – unlike their own – have functioning schools.
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Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and former First Lady Rosalynn Carter discuss how the Center wages peace and fights disease to build hope for millions around the world. They also take questions from the audience. Learn more »
Leaders and everyday citizens in central Mali seek solutions to tribal and political conflict that has disrupted their lives.
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One bright morning in mid-June, a U.N. convoy rolls through the small, dusty town of Kidal in Mali’s northern desert. The temperature is already well on its way to a high of 114, and few people are on the street to witness a Carter Center staffer in a blue flak jacket and helmet clamber out of the back of an armored personnel carrier (what a civilian might call a tank) into the brutal heat.
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Selima Begum, 28, is the mother of a 7-year-old boy with cerebral palsy. They live in Tuker Bazar Union, Sylhet Division, Bangladesh. Since her divorce, Selima has struggled to provide necessary medical care for her son, at times having to forgo routine medical treatments because of a lack of money. Though she works as a housecleaner when she can, it often does not pay enough to meet all her family’s needs.
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By Angelia Sanders, associate director, Trachoma Control Program and vice chair, International Coalition for Trachoma Control
Natural disasters, conflict, and other factors can force entire populations to leave their homes and seek safer living conditions elsewhere. Such people are known as internally displaced persons (or IDPs) if they move within their home country or refugees if they cross international boundaries. Refugees are protected by international laws; IDPs are not. Learn more »
By John Goodman, associate director in the Conflict Resolution Program
The Carter Center's John Goodman, associate director in the Conflict Resolution Program, spoke recently to Al Jazeera's Nicolas Haque in Bamako, Mali, about ongoing violence and instability in Mali and how the people there have seen few, if any, dividends from the peace agreement signed four years ago. Learn more »
A low, boxy building made of rough but neatly mortared concrete blocks stands in the city of Mirriah, located in central Niger. Out back are a three-panel solar power array, a satellite dish, and a 100-foot-tall mast antenna. Inside are two desks with whirring computers, a small room with an electronic audio control panel, and a glassed-in room equipped with a round table, chairs, and two microphones on bases fashioned out of machinery gears.
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Abdalla Yousif recalls how heavy the rain was in Blue Nile state, Sudan. After four hours of torrential rain, the trachoma survey team he was traveling with decided it was best to spend the night in the car. The next morning, they did what they had done so often, they tested the road with their feet, pushed their car out of the mud, and continued to the next village. Learn more »
By Ambassador (ret.) Mary Ann Peters, chief executive officer
The Carter Center operates dozens of initiatives addressing a range of challenging peace and health issues. Some of them seek to end human rights abuses and promote sustainable peace, while others help improve the health of at-risk people in remote places. Learn more »
Courtenay Harris Bond is a 2017–18 Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Journalism Fellowship recipient. She is a freelance journalist and currently a Scattergood Foundation Journalist-in-Residence. Learn more »
Just a few years ago, ISIS controlled giant swaths of Syria – its combined lands totaled more than 34,000 square miles, just a little less than you’ll find in the state of Indiana. Today, it has lost all that territory. But that doesn’t mean it is no longer a threat to the people of Syria. Individuals and groups with ties to ISIS continue to carry out attacks, even as the nature and number of those attacks change. Learn more »
In the spring of 2019, staff members in the Carter Center’s Latin America and Caribbean Program traveled to Mérida, capital of Mexico’s Yucatán state, to present a report about Mexico’s human rights system.
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Through its Public Health Training Initiatives in Nigeria and Sudan, The Carter Center helps educational institutions improve the way they prepare health workers to serve the public. In Nigeria, the initiative supports one institution in each of six states. Learn more »
Just 28 human cases of Guinea worm disease were reported in 2018, down slightly from 30 cases reported in 2017. When The Carter Center began leading the international campaign to eradicate Guinea worm disease in 1986, there were an estimated 3.5 million cases annually in 21 countries.
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In a small, dimly lit office in Birni N'Gaouré, a town in the Dosso region of southern Niger, are a desk, a laptop computer, a lamp, and a ceiling fan. Occupying one wall are square cubbyholes brimming with colorful binders. It looks like something one might see in a kindergarten classroom.
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By Hunter Keys, consultant, Hispaniola Initiative
In the poor neighborhoods where malaria festers in the Dominican Republic, people describe someone who hustles through everyday life as a chiripero, a “lucky sort.” Learn more »
Laura Olson jumped at the chance to work at The Carter Center because of the opportunity to work directly with communities in other countries. “What spoke to me was that The Carter Center really listens to people. We are there to facilitate the changes they want to see and not to tell them what they should do. I also like that we help build local capacity so that communities can independently accomplish their goals.” Learn more »
The Carter Center, with the support of UK Aid, helped prepare a range of voter education materials for the March 31 municipal elections in Yangon, Myanmar. A coalition of 10 civil society organizations, coordinated by our partner New Myanmar Foundation, is using the materials in its street campaign. These are Yangon’s first elections with universal suffrage, so many women and youth will be voting for the first time. Learn more »
Rakia Ado, 20, was at home one day in Katirge, a remote village in southern Niger, when a team of government health workers and Carter Center staffers showed up. The workers, trained and equipped by The Carter Center, explained their mission and asked if they could examine Ado’s eyes and eyelids.
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WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus expresses support for the global campaign to eradicate Guinea worm disease and partner efforts to eliminate neglected tropical diseases. Dr. Tedros personally thanks former U.S. President Jimmy Carter for his leadership in the fight against Guinea worm and The Carter Center for being a cornerstone of the campaign. Learn more »
If you want to get things done in Niger, it helps to know Mohamed Salissou Kané. The Carter Center’s country representative in Niger seems to have connections everywhere.
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By Ambassador (ret.) Mary Ann Peters, chief executive officer
The Center’s work is never easy, even in the best of times, when the world seems eager to embrace the efforts you help make possible in seeking peace, health, and hope for people in need. Learn more »
By Eve Byrd, director, Carter Center Mental Health Program
Under the leadership and guidance of former First Lady Rosalynn Carter, The Carter Center Mental Health Program is joining with other organizations to bring attention and resources to mental health care, both in the United States and abroad. Program Director Eve Byrd explains. Learn more »
Their ancestors were the first to live on the land that came to be known as America, and yet many still have trouble exercising the most basic of American rights – the right to vote. Native Americans face a variety of barriers on their way to the polls, some of which seem almost unbelievable in 2019.
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Life is hard enough in Haiti, with its profound poverty, natural disasters, and troubled political history. Add to the mix an insidious tropical disease that causes permanent disfigurement, and the result is misery that defies description.
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For the indigenous Yanomami people of the Amazon Rainforest, trekking through jungle pathways is a way of life. Such paths serve as the only way in or out of remote Yanomami communities, where the parasitic disease river blindness is transmitted by the bites of tiny black flies. Learn more »
The Carter Center's China Program looks back at President Carter’s 1979 decision to normalize relations with China, and is publishing academic papers to commemorate the anniversary. Learn more »
In July, The Carter Center brought together nearly 70 activists, peacemakers, and religious and community leaders from 36 countries for the annual Human Rights Defenders Forum.
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The Carter Center is commemorating the 40th anniversary of normalizing diplomatic relations with China with a symposium on Jan. 17-19 that will feature dozens of experts on U.S.-China relations. You can read more about this diplomatic feat on this page, which features a Q&A with President Carter, a timeline of key moments in the China Program, and a President Carter-penned op-ed on the future of U.S.-Sino relations that recently ran in The Washington Post.
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Key moments in the Center’s decades-long relationship with the People’s Republic of China.
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From the personal to the political, President Carter reflects on our nation’s – and his own – relationship with China. Excerpt from the Shanghai Institute of American Studies' "Forty People, Forty Years" series commemorating the 40th anniversary of diplomatic normalization between the United States and China.
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A Carter Center initiative is helping Nigeria train health workers to meet the needs of mothers and their babies, particularly in rural areas. Learn more »
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