39th U.S. president Jimmy Carter receiving home hospice care

Former United States President, Jimmy Carter, has entered home hospice care in Plains, Georgia, a statement from The Carter Center has confirmed.

After a series of short hospital stays, the statement said, Carter “decided to spend his remaining time at home with his family and receive hospice care instead of additional medical intervention.”

The statement said the 39th president has the full support of his medical team and family, which “asks for privacy at this time and is grateful for the concern shown by his many admirers.”

Carter, the longest-lived American president, at 98 years old was a little-known Georgia governor when he began his bid for the presidency ahead of the 1976 election. He went on to defeat then-President Gerald R. Ford, capitalising as a Washington outsider in the wake of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal that drove Richard Nixon from office in 1974.

Carter served a single, tumultuous term and was defeated by Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980, a landslide loss that ultimately paved the way for his decades of global advocacy for democracy, public health and human rights via The Carter Center.

The former president and his wife, Rosalynn, 95, opened the center in 1982. His work there garnered a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

Jason Carter, the couple’s grandson who now chairs The Carter Center governing board, said Saturday in a tweet that he “saw both of my grandparents yesterday. They are at peace and—as always—their home is full of love.”

Carter, who has lived most of his life in Plains, traveled extensively into his 80s and early 90s, including annual trips to build homes with Habitat for Humanity and frequent trips abroad as part of the Carter Center’s election monitoring and its effort to eradicate the Guinea worm parasite in developing countries. But the former president’s health has declined over his 10th decade of life, especially as the coronavirus pandemic limited his public appearances, including at his beloved Maranatha Baptist Church where he taught Sunday school lessons for decades before standing-room-only crowds of visitors.

In August 2015, Carter had a small cancerous mass removed from his liver. The following year, Carter announced that he needed no further treatment, as an experimental drug had eliminated any sign of cancer.

Carter celebrated his most recent birthday in October with family and friends in Plains, the tiny town where he and Rosalynn were born in the years between World War I and the Great Depression.

The Carter Center last year marked 40 years of promoting its human rights agenda.
The Center has been a pioneer of election observation, monitoring at least 113 elections in Africa, Latin America, and Asia since 1989. In perhaps its most widely hailed public health effort, the organization recently announced that only 14 human cases of Guinea worm disease were reported in all of 2021, the result of years of public health campaigns to improve access to safe drinking water in Africa.

That’s a staggering drop from when The Carter Center began leading the global eradication effort in 1986, when the parasitic disease infected 3.5 million people. Carter once said he hoped to live longer than the last Guinea worm parasite.

Carter was born Oct. 1, 1924, to a prominent family in rural South Georgia. He went on to the U.S. Naval Academy during World War II and pursued a career as a Cold War Naval officer before returning to Plains, Georgia, with Rosalynn and their young family to take over the family peanut business after Earl Carter’s death in the 1950s.

A moderate Democrat, the younger Carter rapidly climbed from the local school board to the state Senate and then the Georgia governor’s office. He began his White House bid as an underdog with a broad smile, outspoken Baptist mores and policy plans reflecting his education as an engineer. He connected with many Americans because of his promise not to deceive the American people after Nixon’s disgrace and U.S. defeat in Southeast Asia.

“If I ever lie to you, if I ever make a misleading statement, don’t vote for me. I would not deserve to be your president,” Carter said often as he campaigned.

“Yet, despite a record-breaking year of funding for both Ghana and Tunisia, Africa’s ‘big four’ remains firmly entrenched, with no sign yet that it could in any real way turn into a ‘five’ or ‘six’. There are, however, signs that funding is starting to become – slightly – more evenly distributed,” the report said.

Meanwhile, Nigerian startups have again started 2023 on a good note with two of them winning $300,000 at LEAP’s Rocket Fuel Pitch Competition in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia at the just concluded tech conference and exhibition.

At LEAP, over 10,000 startups submitted applications from different countries. After rigorous scrutiny, the applicants were down to 220, and only 90 startups were selected to pitch their business ideas in the semi-final. Eight Nigerian startups participated at the semi-final, and three reached the final stage.

RiceAfrika Technologies – is a tech-driven agric optimisation startup that deploys IoT-enabled harvester and its FARMEasy mobile app for smallholder farming communities in Africa. RiceAfrika believes Africa can feed itself and feed the world. It emerged as the global best in ‘The Tech for Humanity Award’ category and came home with $150,000, while Wicrypt, a tech startup decentralising Internet globally, has a custom operating system (OS) and hardware that allows users to share data with people around them and charge an affordable rate also won $150,000 dollars after he was announced as the global best in the ‘The Into New World Award’ category.

A statement by the Senior Special Assistant Media/Spokesperson to the Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Prof. Isa Pantami, quoted the minister saying, “I am so proud of our Startups, who emerged as the global best in these categories. It is quite a long journey that followed rigorous process until the end; from over 10,000 applications to the final 12, in which three Nigerians took part and two emerged winners. We are delighted that our startups are not only amazing but went through a lot of nurturing and mentorship to be the best in the world,” he noted.

The Minister, who led Nigerian delegations to LEAP and second edition of Digital Cooperation Organisation (DCO) in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, added that Nigeria is on the right track in implementing its National Digital Economy Policy and Strategies to ensure that Nigerian Startups add value to the global tech ecosystem.

According to him, the country is building the ecosystem and making it more conducive for nurturing innovation-driven enterprises.
cent of survey respondents feel that Nigeria “is moving in the wrong direction”, with the main challenges being insecurity, unemployment, the economy, and corruption.

“With such high intention-to-vote, voter turnout looks to be significantly higher than four years ago. However, turnout could be depressed by a combination of insecurity, concern about the freedom and fairness of the election and concern about INEC.
“Eight out of 10 respondents stated – in their words – that there is no person or thing that would make them change their preferred party before the elections.
“Radio and WhatsApp will be the key communication channels for political parties ahead of Election Day”, Nextier added while explaining the survey results.

Nextier Founding Partner, Patrick I. Okigbo III, stated that the presidential election is shaping to be one of the most keenly contested races in recent decades. “It is exciting to see Nigerians take their civic responsibilities seriously.”