Malala Yousafzai

Malala Yousafzai

Malala Yousafzai is a Pakistani education and youth activist. Native to Swat Valley in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Northwest Pakistan, she is known mainly for human rights advocacy for women and for education. She survived a gunshot attack by Taliban militants in October 2012. Attempt  to assassinate her received condemnation across the globe and protests throughout Pakistan. More than 2 million people signed the Right to Education campaign. The petition further helped the ratification of Pakistan’s first right to education bill. In 2014, Malala became the youngest person ever to win Nobel Peace Price. She achieved this feat at the age of 17.

Malala Yousafzai was born in 1997 in Swat valley of Pakistan. She received her basic education in a local school owned by her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, who is a poet and also an education activist. She had been banned from school after Taliban had set an edict that no girls could attend school after 15 January 2009. More than hundred girls' schools in the area were destroyed by pro Taliban activists.  She remained an anonymous BBC blogger for four months or more, writing about her life under the threat of the Taliban taking over her native place. After the BBC blog ended, she was featured in a documentary made Adam B.Ellick, a New York Times reporter . After her appearance in documentary, Malala received greater international coverage and later her identity about writing the BBC blog was revealed.


As reported by New York Times, Malala was attending her chemistry class at the Edgbaston High School for Girls near Birmingham, England when she was informed about her winning of Nobel Prize. She was called out of her class to hear the news. She was declared a Nobel prize winner along with Indian Kailash Satyarthi, a notable children's rights advocate and an activist against child labour.

In 2011, Malala Yousafzai was awarded with Pakistan’s National Youth Peace Prize, but later the prize been since renamed in her honour;  now the same prize is called as National Malala Peace Prize. In 2012, Malala was short-listed for TIME magazine's Person of the Year , and a year after in 2013, she was featured as one of the TIME 100. She has also been awarded with Simone de Beauvoir Prize for international human rights work  and Mother Teresa Memorial Award for Social Justice.