Nobel-winning humanitarian and ex-US president Jimmy Carter dies aged 100

Among the maize, yam and peanut farms of Savelugu-Nanton, a remote district of northern Ghana, the legacy of Jimmy Carter is less complicated than it is back in the former US president’s homeland, Aljazeera reported.

Thanks to the work of his charity, The Carter Center, locals are nowadays spared the misery of Guinea worm disease – a parasite that breeds in the human belly and emerges through the skin before laying larvae in stagnant pools to await the next victim.

Carter’s work in fighting the bug and tracking votes in poor countries won him a Nobel Prize for Peace in 2002. It followed a presidency that achieved a landmark Middle East peace deal, but was hamstrung by economic woes and the Iranian hostage crisis.

He died on Sunday, aged 100, the Carter Center announced. He had entered hospice care in February 2023, electing to stay home after a series of short hospital stays. The former president had been diagnosed with cancer in 2015 but had responded well to treatment. At 100, he was the longest-lived president of the United States, according to Aljazeera.

During six decades of politics, aid work and diplomacy, Carter “was committed to ideals like human rights, peace, and improving human life”, Steven Hochman, research director at The Carter Center, told Al Jazeera.

“He didn’t just want talk, he wanted action,” Hochman said. “Whether this was through monitoring elections in Latin America or witnessing the terrible suffering from Guinea worm disease in Asia and Africa, and working to eradicate it.”