MALALA YOUSAFZAI

Malala Yousafzai is an activist for education, an author, and the youngest Nobel Prize laureate. She is known for her human rights advocacy, particularly for the education of girls in her native Pakistan, where the local Taliban had at times banned girls from attending school. Yousafzai's advocacy work has since grown into an international movement.

“Let us remember: One book, one pen, one child, and one teacher can change the world.”

Born in Mingora, Pakistan to a family determined to give her every opportunity a boy would have, Yousafzai’s life changed in 2008 when the Taliban took control of her town in the Swat Valley. The Taliban banned many things, including girls going to school. At the age of 11, she wrote for the BBC under a pseudonym about her experience growing up under the Taliban occupation and a documentary was made about her life. Yousafzai eventually began to speak out publicly about the importance of educating girls and she became a target of the Taliban. She was shot in the side of her head while riding a bus and awoke 10 days later in a hospital in Birmingham, England. After months of surgeries and rehabilitation, Yousafzai joined her family in their new home in the UK.

“I speak not for myself but for those without voice…those who have fought for their rights... their right to live in peace, their right to be treated with dignity, their right to equality of opportunity, their right to be educated.”

The 2013, 2014, and 2015 issues of Time magazine featured Yousafzai as one of "The 100 Most Influential People in the World." She was the winner of Pakistan's first National Youth Peace Prize and the recipient of the Sakharov Prize, which honors people who have dedicated their lives to the defense of human rights. On Yousafzai's 16th birthday, she spoke at the United Nations to call for worldwide access to education. In 2014, she established the Malala Fund with her father, a charity dedicated to ensuring the safe, free, and quality education for every girl.

“There are many problems, but I think there is a solution to all these problems; it's just one, and it's education.”

In October 2014, Yousafzai was announced as the co-recipient of the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize for her “struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education.” Having received the prize at the age of 17, Yousafzai is the youngest Nobel laureate and the only Pakistani winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Yousafzai has written 3 books, including a memoir and a book about the experiences of refugees. In 2015, she built a school in Lebanon along the Syrian border to educate Syrian refugees with the Malala Fund. Yousafzai graduated from Oxford University in 2020 and continues her work in education advocacy.

“If you hit a Talib with your shoe, then there would be no difference between you and the Talib. You must not treat others with cruelty and that much harshly, you must fight others but through peace and through dialogue and through education.”

Malala Yousafzai, I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban (New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company; 1st edition, 2013).