Malala Yousafzai

Malala Yousafzai was born on July 12, 1997 in Mingora, Pakistan. 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. However, by the time she was ten years old, Taliban extremists began to take control of the area and many of her favorite things were banned. Girls were no longer able to attend school, and owning a television, playing music and dancing were all prohibited. At eleven years old, Yousafzai decided to stand up to the Taliban.

Yousafzai started by blogging anonymously for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in early 2009. She used the penname, “Gul Makai,” and spoke about her life under Taliban rule and how much she wanted to attend school. Her first BBC diary entry entitled, “I Am Afraid,” detailed her nightmares about a full-blown war in her hometown. Her nightmares started to become reality, as Yousafzai and her family were soon forced to leave their home due to rising tensions between Pakistan and the Taliban. This did not stop Yousafzai from advocating for her right to attend school. Over the next few years, she and her father began speaking out on behalf of girls’ education in the media. They campaigned for Pakistani girls’ access to a free quality education. 

On October 9, 2012, fifteen-year old Yousafzai was on a bus with her friends. Two members of the Taliban stopped the bus and asked, “Who is Malala?” When they identified her, they shot her in the head.

She was airlifted to a Pakistani military hospital and then taken to an intensive care unit in England. After ten days in a medically induced coma, Yousafzai woke up in a hospital in Birmingham, England. She had suffered no major brain damage, but the left side of her face was paralyzed, and she would require many reparative surgeries and rehabilitation. After months of medical treatment, Yousafzai was able to return to her family that now lived in England.

In March 2013, Yousafzai began attending school in Birmingham. Although she was now able to attend school in England, she decided to keep fighting “until every girl could go to school.”

On her sixteenth birthday, Yousafzai spoke at the United Nations in New York. That same year she published her autobiography entitled, “I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban.” She was awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought by the European Parliament for her activism.

In 2014, Yousafzai and her father established the Malala Fund to internationally support and advocate for women and girls.  In December of 2014, Yousafzai was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her work. At age seventeen, she became the youngest person to be named a Nobel laureate.

Since then, Yousafzai has continued to advocate for the rights of women and girls. The Malala Fund advocates for quality education for all girls by funding education projects internationally, partnering with global leaders and local advocates, and pioneering innovative strategies to empower young women.