MALALA YOUSAFZAI
“You will never know who stands with you if you don’t stand up first.”
Malala Yousafzai is from Pakistan and is the youngest-ever Nobel Peace Prize Laureate. She is known for human rights advocacy, especially the education of women and children in her native Swat Valley in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, northwest Pakistan, where the local Taliban had at times banned girls from attending school. Her advocacy has grown into an international movement.
1997: Malala was born in Mingora, Pakistan on July 12, 1997. Welcoming a baby girl is not always cause for celebration in Pakistan — but her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, was determined to give her every opportunity a boy would have.
2008: Her father was a teacher and ran a girls’ school in our village. Malala loved school. But everything changed when the Taliban took control of their town in Swat Valley. The extremists banned many things — like owning a television and playing music — and enforced harsh punishments for those who defied their orders, and they said girls could no longer go to school.
In January 2008 when she was just 11 years old, she said goodbye to her classmates, not knowing when — if ever — she would see them again.
2012: She spoke out publicly on behalf of girls and their right to learn. And this made her a target. In October 2012, on her way home from school, a masked gunman boarded her school bus and asked, “Who is Malala?” He shot her on the left side of her head. Malala woke up 10 days later in a hospital in Birmingham, England. The doctors and nurses told her about the attack — and that people around the world were praying for her recovery.
2014: After months of surgeries and rehabilitation, she joined her family in their new home in the U.K. It was then she knew she had a choice: She could live a quiet life or she could make the most of this new life she had been given. She determined to continue her fight until every girl could go to school.
With her father, who had always been her ally and inspiration, she established Malala Fund, a charity dedicated to giving every girl an opportunity to achieve a future she chooses. In recognition of their work, she received the Nobel Peace Prize in December 2014!
2018: She started studying Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University of Oxford. Every day, she fights to ensure all girls receive 12 years of free, safe, quality education. She travels throughout the world to meet girls fighting poverty, wars, child marriage and gender discrimination to go to school.
The Malala Fund is working so that their stories, like hers, can be heard around the world. They invest in developing country educators and activists, like her father, through Malala Fund’s Gulmakai Network and they hold leaders accountable for their promises to girls.
With more than 130 million girls out of school today, there is more work to be done.
“I hope you will join my fight for education and equality. Together, we can create a world where all girls can learn and lead.”
- Malala Yousafzai
Source: https://www.malala.org/
