Jimmy Carter was the thirty-ninth president of the United States of America. Significant foreign policy accomplishments of his administration included the Panama Canal treaties, the Camp David Accords, the treaty of peace between Egypt and Israel, the SALT II treaty with the Soviet Union, and the establishment of US diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China. In 1982, he became University Distinguished Professor at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and founded The Carter Center. Actively guided by Carter, the nonpartisan and nonprofit Center works to advance peace and health worldwide. In 2002, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Jimmy Carter “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”
2008 SESSIONS
2008 Skoll Awards For Social Entrepeneurship
The 2008 Skoll Awards ceremony. Winners were Bill Strickland, Manchester Bidwell; Amazon Conservation Team, Michael Eckhart of ACORE, Connie Duckworth of Arzu, Jeremy Hockenstein and Mai Siriphongphanh of Digital Divide Data; Jenny Bowen of Half the Sky; Matt Flannery and Premal Shah of Kiva; Mitch Besser and Gene Falk, Mothers2Mothers; Paul Farmer of Partners in Health; Daniel Lubetsky of PeaceWorks; Mechai Viravaidya of Population and Community Development Agency; Cecelia Flores-Oebanda of Visayan Forum Foundation
Featuring Remarks by:
Jimmy Carter, Former U.S. President, Founder of The Carter Center
Musical performance by:
Sonidos de la Tierra
Speakers: Jimmy Carter, Jeff Skoll, Sally Osberg
Keynote by President Jimmy Carter at 2008 Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship
From: 2008 Skoll Awards For Social Entrepeneurship | With: Jimmy Carter
My favorite are cartoons. And a New York magazine is of a young boy, looking at his father, and he says, "Daddy, when I grow up I wanna be a former president. Well, one reason that the little boy said that, and I agree with him is, to be able to participate in a program like this, in this historic place, where I visited not too many months ago to be honored myself and to be a partner, not only in this transient moment but i hope on a permanent basis with The Skoll Foundation.
I look forward to being with all of you tonight ever since Jeff first invited me and before I accepted I asked him what is a social entrepreneur?" And his answer surprised me, and I say honored me He said, "You are one." Well, I did some research and I found some inspiring definitions and let me read just a few.
Someone with new ideas about some of humanity's oldest problems, and willing to take risks to implement those ideas. Another one is, someone who is willing to learn, and eager to teach. Someone who looks at problems and crises and sees only opportunities. And another one, I don't know if it applies to me or not, someone who is abnormally persistent; stubborn, in fact.
Well I thought about the social entrepreneurs in my life who have meant something to me and helped to shape my life. As a matter of fact, some of them are completely unknown. And some of them later became famous. Among the five people who shaped my life was Willis Wright, a black sharecropper, who had never had anything under his control in all his life except 35 acres of land and two mules.
But he was a leader. He was courageous, stalwart, intelligent, admirable in the times when I grew up in south Georgia when racial discrimination prevailed. The so-called "separate but equal" policy that was established by our own US Constitution, and prevailed In discrimination against our black neighbors, for about a hundred years, Willis Wright was asked by his fellow church members, you know, a remote little church, if he would represent them.
And become the first black man who ever registered to vote in Webster county, Georgia. And he was not a political activist, but he said, "yes, I'll do it." So he went to the courthouse, and there was a trick in the South then - there were 30 questions that had to be answered before someone could register to vote if they were Black.
Even an accomplished lawyer couldn't answer all the questions. He didn't answer the questions. He came to see me and asked me what he should do about it and I said, "Willis, I think you ought to continue trying and I'll be glad to go with you if you want me to." He said "no sir it wouldn't mean anything if you went with me." So he went back and the registrar, when he saw Willis Wright come in, laid a 45 caliber pistol on the table.
And he said, "I'll say the word Nigger, what do you want?" And he said, "I still want to register to vote." He did. And in just a few years, every black family in Webster county, Georgia was able to register to vote. Not many people know about that, nobody much ever heard of Willis Wright, but he was one of the five people who shaped my entire family, my entire life.
Another one was even closer to me and that was my mother. My mother was a registered nurse in those depression years. The unemployment rate in America was almost 40%. We had hundreds of unemployed people walking by our house everyday. We called them hobos. They were people who had been laid off from their jobs up North, and they'd come down to the South, in a [xx] to just keep warm.
My mother acted among our neighbors as a doctor, although she was just a registered nurse. We didn't have any white neighbors. I grew up Never having any white neighbors. All my neighbors were black, and mother nurtured them. Later after my father died, Mother went through a series of experiences, and finally decided to be a Peace Corp volunteer.
And at the age of 70, she went to India. She said, "Send me somewhere where people are in need, and their skins are dark-colored. There was only two request. She went to an old village called Vicrole. They had 20,000 people working in it, and she was a nurse there and acted as a doctor, and she became an untouchable.
Because she had to deal with bodily fluids, and she washed her own clothes, and she cleaned their own house. Mother nursed lepers. I wrote a poem about it. And the final line in the poem Between her and a little girl who spoke Murati, was that mother had gone through a process of nobody wanted to touch the child because she had so much fear of leprosy.
And the final line, and the point was that I didn't feel ashamed when we kissed each other. Mother came home and made about 600 speeches and I've just finished writing a biography of my mother. It will be out in a couple of weeks. My wife asked me to announce that it will be on sale soon. Another person who I think is more famous than my mother or certainly Willis Wright is Don Hopkins.
Don Hopkins was another African American who struggled and finally became a student, and went to Moorhouse College in Atlanta. On one of his vacations, he got a partial payment and he went to Egypt. Quite an achievement for a Black American in those days. He was just an undergraduate. He saw there a horrible disease called trachoma, which I had known a little as a child.
And it afflicted Egyptian people, and it was not being treated. So that changed Don Hopkin's life and he became interested in becoming a specialist in preventive Health care, he volunteered to go to Africa and work on the final stages of small pox erradication. He was in charge of the West African portion, including Sierra Leone.
And 10 years after he went there, the last case of small pox was eradicated in 1978. Thirty years ago. There hasn't been another disease eraticated since. Don Hopkins came back and he became a professor at Harvard. Then he went to the centers for disease control in Atlanta, CDC. He ultimately became the acting director of the CDC.
He became interested in tropical diseases, and now he works at the Carter Center. He's in charge of all our disease eradication program. And I'll mention him again in just a few minutes. Another one other I like to mention, social entrepreneur, is Norman Borlaug, who is famous. He was a dirt farmer from Iowa who eventually went into agricultural research and the international center for corn and wheat, in Spanish it's SEMI,Wheat and corn.
He helped develop a species of wheat, that was staunch in that it wouldn't lodge or bend over in bad weather but short stemmed and, it was very high yield, and resisted diseases. And Norman Borlaug decided he would take that wheat to India and Pakistan where millions of people literally were starving to death, and he introduced the wheat among those farmers and saved hundreds of millions of people's lives.
Some analysts have said a billion people's lives. Norman Borlaug, say, he was given a Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, as a dirt farmer. He shared his knowledge with People in need... well... when I studied entreprenuers on the Skoll website, I found a lot about the foundation.
I realize that another quality of social entrepreneurs is it that they are people of faith.
And I don't necessarily mean religious faith, but they have a special kind of faith that's extremely important for any human being, particularly one who wants to lead in innovative endeavors, and it is faith in oneself, and perhaps more importantly, faith in other people. Who could be a better social entrepreneur then Jeff Skoll?
He was a young man who went on to make millions and then to share those millions, with other people. You have the qualities that are being recognized tonite on this stage in just a few minutes. Jeff and his foundation of finding such people all over the globe and furnishing them I would say with three vital things.
Many of you know more about the foundation than I. One is encouragement and the second one is a network of kindred spirits, kind of a collective partnership that's evolving. Now almost five dozen honorees and of course, the practical support after the social entrepreneurs prove themselves. Having had enough insight and ability to be at least successful in getting an enterprise started.
This is worthy work and it's bearing great fruit. I'll just mention two or three of them there, as I said, there will be after tonight, fifty nine I believe. Joe Madiath believed that people need to have running water and basic sanitation as they seek education and job training and better health and he announced his goal as providing water and sanitation for a hundred thousand people, Indian families by 2010.
Karen Tse
is promoting justice by establishing a network of public defenders in China, and she expects to extend that to Vietnam and Cambodia. Ms. Tse was at the Carter Center this past September, as we honored human rights defenders from around the world. Victoria Hale was concerned about infectious diseases which account for 60 percent of all the deaths among the people, world's poorest people. And she established a non-profit pharmacutacle companies. It's already producing drugs. And she thinks that by the end of this year she'll have 5 new drugs to give as medicine to prevent these unnecessary deaths.
Well Joe and Karen and Victoria
that I've mentioned, are the recipients of the skull award. And there are many others of course, I wish I had time to talk about all of them and nothing else, but Jeff has asked me to make a few comments about the Carter center.
Jeff agrees with what I said in Oslo in 2002. He mentioned that the greatest challenge of the 21st century is a growing gap Between the rich people on earth and the poor people on earth. Greatest challenge, growing gap. And as people become richer and richer and poorer and poorer. It's very difficult to cross that chasm that evolves between us.
Another announcement that I made even earlier back in 1977 was that human rights would be the foundation of my nation's foreign policy. And since then, working among people in 70 of the poorest countries on earth - 35 of them, not surprisingly, in Africa. I've come to realize that there's not much thought given to the American or the British emphases on human rights.
Freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, trial by jury. Even the right to to elect our own leaders fade into relative insignificance when a family lacks food or shelter or clothing, or a modicum of health care or any education at all or a chance for self respect, human dignity, our hope that the future will be better.
This realization has been the guiding principle of all our programs at the Carter Center to cover the whole gamut of human rights. We've tried to find some of those glaring gaps between the rich and the poor, and to fill those gaps. In fact, the first conference we had at the Carter Center on health was called Closing The Gap.
We had a 125 participants, about a dozen of them were Nobel laureates. They were the foremost experts on healthcare on Earth. And we learned there, all of us did that 2/3rds of all deaths before the age of 65 are totally preventable. If people have knowledge, access to medical care and the finical means to invest in their own health.
Rich people have all these means. But they die unnecessarily because of smoking, improper diet, obesity, a lack of exercise or other personal choices that they made. Our work has been among those who suffer and die because they don't have any of those means. They don't have the knowledge about their own diseases.
They don't have the medicines to prevent or cure them. They don't have assistance from other people who sometimes care, and sometimes don't care about them. They don't have the money to buy, even if they know what they need.
There are about three fourths of the Carter Center's work, of money and personal are devoted to five, so called neglected diseases. That's a definition imposed by the world health organization that inflict tens or even hundreds of millions of people every year. They are diseases that most people in this audience probably have never heard of.
Dracunculiasis, oncho-cerciasis, lymphatic filariasis, schistosomiasis, trachoma. See, we don't know them. But hundreds of millions of people know them, which is the proof that rich people have already eliminated them and they can be eliminated. We go into the most remote villages and then to the most remote homes on Earth in the deserts and jungles of Africa and Latin America.
And we give them a chance to learn how to improve their own lives. We give them the responsibility and the knowledge and a little bit of assistance to make changes in their own communities. We have at The Carter Center of the International task force on disease eradication, the only one on Earth, charged with analyzing every human illness that exists and ascertaining which ones might theoretically be completely eliminated from a given country or region, or completely eradicated from the entire face of the Earth.
The man in charge, Don Hopkins, that I mentioned earlier. There's one horrible disease that The Carter Center has pledged to eradicate completely, Dracunculiasis, that I mentioned earlier, or Guinea worm. Guinea worm is widely known even in the Bible as a fiery serpent and you see the symbol for doctors, the caduceus, it's a staff with 2 guinea worms wrapped around it. A lot of people think they're snakes. Based on the Latin root from which the name derives is Dracunculiasis. An evil sounding name Dracunculiasis, and it's an evil disease. It's caused by the drinking of water from a stagnant pond that fills up during the rainy season and a worms, eggs inside, grow under the skin to a length of about 30 to 36 inches, and a year after they drink the water it begins to emerge through the skin making a horrible sore that destroys tissue and destroys muscle and leave an aftermath similar to Polio. I first saw Guinea Worm in a remote village in Ghana. A little village it only looking at about 500 people.
That's about the same size as Plains, Georgia where I live. 300 of the people had worms emerging from their bodies. Don Hopkins was there and everyone who was still able to walk or, drag themselves, assembled in the center of the village to welcome us. I explained to the chief, a little tiny man with a great deal of authority and a great deal of self-respect and pride, why we had come. I assured him that we knew how to end the plague of worms that was starting in his pond. And I described the, Don Hopkins, described the measures by which. We would eliminate the disease. The chief responded, Mr. President we looked in the water we don't see any worms. And our water hole is sacred.
The gods send the rains every spring to fill the pond up and we drank the water the rest of the year. If it wasn't for the pond, our sacred pond, our village wouldn't exists. Our revere ancestors would never have lived and you're casting aspersions on a pond. He invited me to walk around and visit the people who were assembled there.
Some were still in their huts, they were unable to come out. And my eyes were attracted to a beautiful young woman, I would guess her about twenty years old. I saw her holding what I thought was her baby in her right arm, and I went up to ask her what the name of the baby was. It wasn't her baby, it was her right breast, terribly elongated and swollen.
A worm was coming out of the nipple of her breast. I'll never forget it. Later I learned that she had eleven other guinea worms emerge from her body the same year. I finally convinced the Chief that our facts were accurate and that the only negative allegation we were making were not against that sacred pond, but just about these worms that were in the pond.
And he finally let us help. He only did it because I said "Look we will not do anything except under your control and in fact we'll let you do all the work". Rosen and I and Don Hopkins came back a year later. Zero guinea worms. And those people since that time have never seen and will never see another guinea worm.
Well, we've done the same thing in 23, 600 villages. I'm an engineer so we count everything. And countries across Sub Sahara Africa and Thrian India. Thrian Asian, India, Pakistan, and Yemen. We found 3.6 million cases of this disease. And in every case, work heroically and some had very difficult times, south of Sudan for instance was in a war, two million people had been killed in the revolutionary war.
We couldn't get into the south, we finally negotiated a peace agreement, a ceasefire for six months. So let us go into the southern part of Sudan. And in all the nations, they are now less than 9,000 cases left. A reduction of 99.8% and we know every case on earth and we're taking care of it to the best of our ability.
And I'll be going to Africa next week, as a matter of fact, to Ghana and to Nigeria to honor four countries that became guinea worm free last year and we'll soon have eradicated the second disease in history. Both of them orchestrated directly by, both orchestrated directly or indirectly by a social entrepreneur named Don Hopkins.
The most powerful tool we have is not food or money or medicine or even the necessary filter clause. It's the dedicated work of people who for the first time in their lives understand that they themselves can take charge of a difficult problem if given the means and information, and correct the problem.
The Carter Center like the school foundation is an action agency who rely on people, on experts like Don Hopkins and Dr. Borlaug and communicate with people in need and give them a chance for self-respect and hope for a better future. When we go into villages, we often find other serious health problems.
The same neighborhoods have Onchocerciasis or river blindness, and I won't go into detail about these. It takes too long but Merck and Company found out a few years back that a veterinary medicine they use, if you have a puppy dog you give the dog every month, Heartgard, a research scientist from Turkey, discovered that this same medicine would prevent people going blind with river blindness.
So, Merck came to the Carter Center and said we'll give you the medicine free. Last November we administered our hundred millionth dose of what they call Mectizan, and last year alone we treated 11.7 million people, and they'll never go blind. And we are learning now that in some areas, we can completely eradicate this disease, forever.
There'll never be another person to go blind, for instance, in six countries in Latin America. The number one cause of blindness, by the way, preventable blindness, is trachoma. Trachoma is caused by filthy eyes, where flies gather around the eye and cause it to be infected and the upper lid turns inward so everytime the person blinks the eye it scratches the cornea, and causes blindness.
And so we're dealing with this disease as well. One of the interesting things here is, that we have a lot of social entrepreneurs, in a central part of Ethiopia, all women, because its one of the key factors in eliminating trachoma is to get rid of the flies you have to get rid of the human excrement on the ground and in those areas of the world it's completely taboo for a woman to relieve herself in the day time.
So, they couldn't urinate or defecate in the daytime. So we designed a very simple latrine, that doesn't cost anything if the family does its own work and it's, put a screen around it and a hole in the ground and so forth. I won't go into detail. But we thought maybe we'll get 10,000 of these built in central Ethiopia.
We just passed the 400,000 mark because of women adapted it as a learn this liberation. Now they can themselves. We're also treating lymphatic filariasis which you may know as Elephantiasis. It's when your arms or legs or sexual organs swell up to grotesque sizes. And this is caused by mosquitoes, so with treated bed nets we can kill the mosquitoes and prevent both malaria and lymphatic filariasis at the same time.
And we were now in the process of putting 2 bed nets in every home in Ethiopia where they have those mosquitoes. I mentioned Norman Borlaug earlier. He was 94 years old 2 days ago, on the 25th day of this month and he's still active and an inspiration to all who know him. He's been working with the Carter Center on agriculture program.
We consider nutrition to be a health problem, malnutrition. And so we decided with Dr. Borlaug and a generous Japanese entrepreneur, a philanthropist, that we would teach small farmers in Africa how to grow more food grain. We don't deal with cotton or other cash crops, just five grains primarily.
Maize, which is corn, wheat, oats, sorghum, and millet. I'm a farmer myself, I really like this and Dr. Borlaug has been the guiding light, and we've finished treating 9 million African farmers and they are able to double or triple their production of food grains. Well, it's easy to become discouraged in the face of the world's tragedies which are voluminous. I'm sure that everyone in this room has felt the pain of discouragement and knows its debilitating power at least if not in you, then certainly in those in whom you know. But heroic social entrepreneurs are not daunted by intractable problems. I'm now 83 years old. And my wife, Rose, well I won't go into Rose's age, she could be younger than that. And our staff for some reason has never been comfortable talking about our deaths, so they refer to the prospect of reducing my level of paticipation.
But I can tell you that we've make careful preperations and when this time comes then the work of the Carter will continue, and obviously so will yours. I know that Jeff Skoll feels a sense of urgency, and so do I, as we assemble in this beautiful and historic place. People are dying, children are starving.
Our planet is in trouble with Mother Earth betrayed by her own children. Ignorance, which a form of intolerance festers in the human race, just as Guinea Worms festers in human bodies. Creating understanding among people I would say is the most pervasive need in our world and the most effective solution to its problems.
Communicating with an African chief, Or convincing the leaders of major countries, especially my own, just to talk to each other. Is a notable challenge and achievement. Well, in conclusion, let me say that communication is a lifeline of a social entrepreneur, and there's no action in Jeff, an activist, is really just a story teller.
His film company has won Oscars and other awards, but more importantly as you know, they've shown the ongoing genocide in Southern Sudan, the AIDS epidemic in South Africa, the eminent threat and long-term consequences of global warming helped by Al Gore, and a pathway to peace in the Middle East.
The Skoll Foundation has made a priority of highlighting hidden change-makers who quietly perform acts of redemption around the world. Hearing their stories, we'll hear a little more tonight, encourages us and lifts up new ideas. Ideas can change the world, as you know. I am inspired by your stories, you who commit your Intelligence and your energy and your life to this work.
I thank-you all for what you do. I wish you God speed in your enlightened vocations. You social entrepreneurs are indeed the hope of our future world.
I look forward to being with all of you tonight ever since Jeff first invited me and before I accepted I asked him what is a social entrepreneur?" And his answer surprised me, and I say honored me He said, "You are one." Well, I did some research and I found some inspiring definitions and let me read just a few.
Someone with new ideas about some of humanity's oldest problems, and willing to take risks to implement those ideas. Another one is, someone who is willing to learn, and eager to teach. Someone who looks at problems and crises and sees only opportunities. And another one, I don't know if it applies to me or not, someone who is abnormally persistent; stubborn, in fact.
Well I thought about the social entrepreneurs in my life who have meant something to me and helped to shape my life. As a matter of fact, some of them are completely unknown. And some of them later became famous. Among the five people who shaped my life was Willis Wright, a black sharecropper, who had never had anything under his control in all his life except 35 acres of land and two mules.
But he was a leader. He was courageous, stalwart, intelligent, admirable in the times when I grew up in south Georgia when racial discrimination prevailed. The so-called "separate but equal" policy that was established by our own US Constitution, and prevailed In discrimination against our black neighbors, for about a hundred years, Willis Wright was asked by his fellow church members, you know, a remote little church, if he would represent them.
And become the first black man who ever registered to vote in Webster county, Georgia. And he was not a political activist, but he said, "yes, I'll do it." So he went to the courthouse, and there was a trick in the South then - there were 30 questions that had to be answered before someone could register to vote if they were Black.
Even an accomplished lawyer couldn't answer all the questions. He didn't answer the questions. He came to see me and asked me what he should do about it and I said, "Willis, I think you ought to continue trying and I'll be glad to go with you if you want me to." He said "no sir it wouldn't mean anything if you went with me." So he went back and the registrar, when he saw Willis Wright come in, laid a 45 caliber pistol on the table.
And he said, "I'll say the word Nigger, what do you want?" And he said, "I still want to register to vote." He did. And in just a few years, every black family in Webster county, Georgia was able to register to vote. Not many people know about that, nobody much ever heard of Willis Wright, but he was one of the five people who shaped my entire family, my entire life.
Another one was even closer to me and that was my mother. My mother was a registered nurse in those depression years. The unemployment rate in America was almost 40%. We had hundreds of unemployed people walking by our house everyday. We called them hobos. They were people who had been laid off from their jobs up North, and they'd come down to the South, in a [xx] to just keep warm.
My mother acted among our neighbors as a doctor, although she was just a registered nurse. We didn't have any white neighbors. I grew up Never having any white neighbors. All my neighbors were black, and mother nurtured them. Later after my father died, Mother went through a series of experiences, and finally decided to be a Peace Corp volunteer.
And at the age of 70, she went to India. She said, "Send me somewhere where people are in need, and their skins are dark-colored. There was only two request. She went to an old village called Vicrole. They had 20,000 people working in it, and she was a nurse there and acted as a doctor, and she became an untouchable.
Because she had to deal with bodily fluids, and she washed her own clothes, and she cleaned their own house. Mother nursed lepers. I wrote a poem about it. And the final line in the poem Between her and a little girl who spoke Murati, was that mother had gone through a process of nobody wanted to touch the child because she had so much fear of leprosy.
And the final line, and the point was that I didn't feel ashamed when we kissed each other. Mother came home and made about 600 speeches and I've just finished writing a biography of my mother. It will be out in a couple of weeks. My wife asked me to announce that it will be on sale soon. Another person who I think is more famous than my mother or certainly Willis Wright is Don Hopkins.
Don Hopkins was another African American who struggled and finally became a student, and went to Moorhouse College in Atlanta. On one of his vacations, he got a partial payment and he went to Egypt. Quite an achievement for a Black American in those days. He was just an undergraduate. He saw there a horrible disease called trachoma, which I had known a little as a child.
And it afflicted Egyptian people, and it was not being treated. So that changed Don Hopkin's life and he became interested in becoming a specialist in preventive Health care, he volunteered to go to Africa and work on the final stages of small pox erradication. He was in charge of the West African portion, including Sierra Leone.
And 10 years after he went there, the last case of small pox was eradicated in 1978. Thirty years ago. There hasn't been another disease eraticated since. Don Hopkins came back and he became a professor at Harvard. Then he went to the centers for disease control in Atlanta, CDC. He ultimately became the acting director of the CDC.
He became interested in tropical diseases, and now he works at the Carter Center. He's in charge of all our disease eradication program. And I'll mention him again in just a few minutes. Another one other I like to mention, social entrepreneur, is Norman Borlaug, who is famous. He was a dirt farmer from Iowa who eventually went into agricultural research and the international center for corn and wheat, in Spanish it's SEMI,Wheat and corn.
He helped develop a species of wheat, that was staunch in that it wouldn't lodge or bend over in bad weather but short stemmed and, it was very high yield, and resisted diseases. And Norman Borlaug decided he would take that wheat to India and Pakistan where millions of people literally were starving to death, and he introduced the wheat among those farmers and saved hundreds of millions of people's lives.
Some analysts have said a billion people's lives. Norman Borlaug, say, he was given a Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, as a dirt farmer. He shared his knowledge with People in need... well... when I studied entreprenuers on the Skoll website, I found a lot about the foundation.
I realize that another quality of social entrepreneurs is it that they are people of faith.
And I don't necessarily mean religious faith, but they have a special kind of faith that's extremely important for any human being, particularly one who wants to lead in innovative endeavors, and it is faith in oneself, and perhaps more importantly, faith in other people. Who could be a better social entrepreneur then Jeff Skoll?
He was a young man who went on to make millions and then to share those millions, with other people. You have the qualities that are being recognized tonite on this stage in just a few minutes. Jeff and his foundation of finding such people all over the globe and furnishing them I would say with three vital things.
Many of you know more about the foundation than I. One is encouragement and the second one is a network of kindred spirits, kind of a collective partnership that's evolving. Now almost five dozen honorees and of course, the practical support after the social entrepreneurs prove themselves. Having had enough insight and ability to be at least successful in getting an enterprise started.
This is worthy work and it's bearing great fruit. I'll just mention two or three of them there, as I said, there will be after tonight, fifty nine I believe. Joe Madiath believed that people need to have running water and basic sanitation as they seek education and job training and better health and he announced his goal as providing water and sanitation for a hundred thousand people, Indian families by 2010.
Karen Tse
is promoting justice by establishing a network of public defenders in China, and she expects to extend that to Vietnam and Cambodia. Ms. Tse was at the Carter Center this past September, as we honored human rights defenders from around the world. Victoria Hale was concerned about infectious diseases which account for 60 percent of all the deaths among the people, world's poorest people. And she established a non-profit pharmacutacle companies. It's already producing drugs. And she thinks that by the end of this year she'll have 5 new drugs to give as medicine to prevent these unnecessary deaths.
Well Joe and Karen and Victoria
that I've mentioned, are the recipients of the skull award. And there are many others of course, I wish I had time to talk about all of them and nothing else, but Jeff has asked me to make a few comments about the Carter center.
Jeff agrees with what I said in Oslo in 2002. He mentioned that the greatest challenge of the 21st century is a growing gap Between the rich people on earth and the poor people on earth. Greatest challenge, growing gap. And as people become richer and richer and poorer and poorer. It's very difficult to cross that chasm that evolves between us.
Another announcement that I made even earlier back in 1977 was that human rights would be the foundation of my nation's foreign policy. And since then, working among people in 70 of the poorest countries on earth - 35 of them, not surprisingly, in Africa. I've come to realize that there's not much thought given to the American or the British emphases on human rights.
Freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, trial by jury. Even the right to to elect our own leaders fade into relative insignificance when a family lacks food or shelter or clothing, or a modicum of health care or any education at all or a chance for self respect, human dignity, our hope that the future will be better.
This realization has been the guiding principle of all our programs at the Carter Center to cover the whole gamut of human rights. We've tried to find some of those glaring gaps between the rich and the poor, and to fill those gaps. In fact, the first conference we had at the Carter Center on health was called Closing The Gap.
We had a 125 participants, about a dozen of them were Nobel laureates. They were the foremost experts on healthcare on Earth. And we learned there, all of us did that 2/3rds of all deaths before the age of 65 are totally preventable. If people have knowledge, access to medical care and the finical means to invest in their own health.
Rich people have all these means. But they die unnecessarily because of smoking, improper diet, obesity, a lack of exercise or other personal choices that they made. Our work has been among those who suffer and die because they don't have any of those means. They don't have the knowledge about their own diseases.
They don't have the medicines to prevent or cure them. They don't have assistance from other people who sometimes care, and sometimes don't care about them. They don't have the money to buy, even if they know what they need.
There are about three fourths of the Carter Center's work, of money and personal are devoted to five, so called neglected diseases. That's a definition imposed by the world health organization that inflict tens or even hundreds of millions of people every year. They are diseases that most people in this audience probably have never heard of.
Dracunculiasis, oncho-cerciasis, lymphatic filariasis, schistosomiasis, trachoma. See, we don't know them. But hundreds of millions of people know them, which is the proof that rich people have already eliminated them and they can be eliminated. We go into the most remote villages and then to the most remote homes on Earth in the deserts and jungles of Africa and Latin America.
And we give them a chance to learn how to improve their own lives. We give them the responsibility and the knowledge and a little bit of assistance to make changes in their own communities. We have at The Carter Center of the International task force on disease eradication, the only one on Earth, charged with analyzing every human illness that exists and ascertaining which ones might theoretically be completely eliminated from a given country or region, or completely eradicated from the entire face of the Earth.
The man in charge, Don Hopkins, that I mentioned earlier. There's one horrible disease that The Carter Center has pledged to eradicate completely, Dracunculiasis, that I mentioned earlier, or Guinea worm. Guinea worm is widely known even in the Bible as a fiery serpent and you see the symbol for doctors, the caduceus, it's a staff with 2 guinea worms wrapped around it. A lot of people think they're snakes. Based on the Latin root from which the name derives is Dracunculiasis. An evil sounding name Dracunculiasis, and it's an evil disease. It's caused by the drinking of water from a stagnant pond that fills up during the rainy season and a worms, eggs inside, grow under the skin to a length of about 30 to 36 inches, and a year after they drink the water it begins to emerge through the skin making a horrible sore that destroys tissue and destroys muscle and leave an aftermath similar to Polio. I first saw Guinea Worm in a remote village in Ghana. A little village it only looking at about 500 people.
That's about the same size as Plains, Georgia where I live. 300 of the people had worms emerging from their bodies. Don Hopkins was there and everyone who was still able to walk or, drag themselves, assembled in the center of the village to welcome us. I explained to the chief, a little tiny man with a great deal of authority and a great deal of self-respect and pride, why we had come. I assured him that we knew how to end the plague of worms that was starting in his pond. And I described the, Don Hopkins, described the measures by which. We would eliminate the disease. The chief responded, Mr. President we looked in the water we don't see any worms. And our water hole is sacred.
The gods send the rains every spring to fill the pond up and we drank the water the rest of the year. If it wasn't for the pond, our sacred pond, our village wouldn't exists. Our revere ancestors would never have lived and you're casting aspersions on a pond. He invited me to walk around and visit the people who were assembled there.
Some were still in their huts, they were unable to come out. And my eyes were attracted to a beautiful young woman, I would guess her about twenty years old. I saw her holding what I thought was her baby in her right arm, and I went up to ask her what the name of the baby was. It wasn't her baby, it was her right breast, terribly elongated and swollen.
A worm was coming out of the nipple of her breast. I'll never forget it. Later I learned that she had eleven other guinea worms emerge from her body the same year. I finally convinced the Chief that our facts were accurate and that the only negative allegation we were making were not against that sacred pond, but just about these worms that were in the pond.
And he finally let us help. He only did it because I said "Look we will not do anything except under your control and in fact we'll let you do all the work". Rosen and I and Don Hopkins came back a year later. Zero guinea worms. And those people since that time have never seen and will never see another guinea worm.
Well, we've done the same thing in 23, 600 villages. I'm an engineer so we count everything. And countries across Sub Sahara Africa and Thrian India. Thrian Asian, India, Pakistan, and Yemen. We found 3.6 million cases of this disease. And in every case, work heroically and some had very difficult times, south of Sudan for instance was in a war, two million people had been killed in the revolutionary war.
We couldn't get into the south, we finally negotiated a peace agreement, a ceasefire for six months. So let us go into the southern part of Sudan. And in all the nations, they are now less than 9,000 cases left. A reduction of 99.8% and we know every case on earth and we're taking care of it to the best of our ability.
And I'll be going to Africa next week, as a matter of fact, to Ghana and to Nigeria to honor four countries that became guinea worm free last year and we'll soon have eradicated the second disease in history. Both of them orchestrated directly by, both orchestrated directly or indirectly by a social entrepreneur named Don Hopkins.
The most powerful tool we have is not food or money or medicine or even the necessary filter clause. It's the dedicated work of people who for the first time in their lives understand that they themselves can take charge of a difficult problem if given the means and information, and correct the problem.
The Carter Center like the school foundation is an action agency who rely on people, on experts like Don Hopkins and Dr. Borlaug and communicate with people in need and give them a chance for self-respect and hope for a better future. When we go into villages, we often find other serious health problems.
The same neighborhoods have Onchocerciasis or river blindness, and I won't go into detail about these. It takes too long but Merck and Company found out a few years back that a veterinary medicine they use, if you have a puppy dog you give the dog every month, Heartgard, a research scientist from Turkey, discovered that this same medicine would prevent people going blind with river blindness.
So, Merck came to the Carter Center and said we'll give you the medicine free. Last November we administered our hundred millionth dose of what they call Mectizan, and last year alone we treated 11.7 million people, and they'll never go blind. And we are learning now that in some areas, we can completely eradicate this disease, forever.
There'll never be another person to go blind, for instance, in six countries in Latin America. The number one cause of blindness, by the way, preventable blindness, is trachoma. Trachoma is caused by filthy eyes, where flies gather around the eye and cause it to be infected and the upper lid turns inward so everytime the person blinks the eye it scratches the cornea, and causes blindness.
And so we're dealing with this disease as well. One of the interesting things here is, that we have a lot of social entrepreneurs, in a central part of Ethiopia, all women, because its one of the key factors in eliminating trachoma is to get rid of the flies you have to get rid of the human excrement on the ground and in those areas of the world it's completely taboo for a woman to relieve herself in the day time.
So, they couldn't urinate or defecate in the daytime. So we designed a very simple latrine, that doesn't cost anything if the family does its own work and it's, put a screen around it and a hole in the ground and so forth. I won't go into detail. But we thought maybe we'll get 10,000 of these built in central Ethiopia.
We just passed the 400,000 mark because of women adapted it as a learn this liberation. Now they can themselves. We're also treating lymphatic filariasis which you may know as Elephantiasis. It's when your arms or legs or sexual organs swell up to grotesque sizes. And this is caused by mosquitoes, so with treated bed nets we can kill the mosquitoes and prevent both malaria and lymphatic filariasis at the same time.
And we were now in the process of putting 2 bed nets in every home in Ethiopia where they have those mosquitoes. I mentioned Norman Borlaug earlier. He was 94 years old 2 days ago, on the 25th day of this month and he's still active and an inspiration to all who know him. He's been working with the Carter Center on agriculture program.
We consider nutrition to be a health problem, malnutrition. And so we decided with Dr. Borlaug and a generous Japanese entrepreneur, a philanthropist, that we would teach small farmers in Africa how to grow more food grain. We don't deal with cotton or other cash crops, just five grains primarily.
Maize, which is corn, wheat, oats, sorghum, and millet. I'm a farmer myself, I really like this and Dr. Borlaug has been the guiding light, and we've finished treating 9 million African farmers and they are able to double or triple their production of food grains. Well, it's easy to become discouraged in the face of the world's tragedies which are voluminous. I'm sure that everyone in this room has felt the pain of discouragement and knows its debilitating power at least if not in you, then certainly in those in whom you know. But heroic social entrepreneurs are not daunted by intractable problems. I'm now 83 years old. And my wife, Rose, well I won't go into Rose's age, she could be younger than that. And our staff for some reason has never been comfortable talking about our deaths, so they refer to the prospect of reducing my level of paticipation.
But I can tell you that we've make careful preperations and when this time comes then the work of the Carter will continue, and obviously so will yours. I know that Jeff Skoll feels a sense of urgency, and so do I, as we assemble in this beautiful and historic place. People are dying, children are starving.
Our planet is in trouble with Mother Earth betrayed by her own children. Ignorance, which a form of intolerance festers in the human race, just as Guinea Worms festers in human bodies. Creating understanding among people I would say is the most pervasive need in our world and the most effective solution to its problems.
Communicating with an African chief, Or convincing the leaders of major countries, especially my own, just to talk to each other. Is a notable challenge and achievement. Well, in conclusion, let me say that communication is a lifeline of a social entrepreneur, and there's no action in Jeff, an activist, is really just a story teller.
His film company has won Oscars and other awards, but more importantly as you know, they've shown the ongoing genocide in Southern Sudan, the AIDS epidemic in South Africa, the eminent threat and long-term consequences of global warming helped by Al Gore, and a pathway to peace in the Middle East.
The Skoll Foundation has made a priority of highlighting hidden change-makers who quietly perform acts of redemption around the world. Hearing their stories, we'll hear a little more tonight, encourages us and lifts up new ideas. Ideas can change the world, as you know. I am inspired by your stories, you who commit your Intelligence and your energy and your life to this work.
I thank-you all for what you do. I wish you God speed in your enlightened vocations. You social entrepreneurs are indeed the hope of our future world.
