Malala Yousafzai


Malala Yousafzai is a campaigner for girls’ education from Pakistan. As a young girl of 11, the Pakistani student wrote an anonymous diary about what life was like under the rule of an extreme group called the Taliban in north-west Pakistan. In the diary, she talked about how she wanted to stay in education and about how girls should be able to go to school. The Taliban wanted to ban girls’ education. Millions of people from all over the world read her diary and she became well known for fighting for her right to an education. The Taliban did not like this and because of what she said in her diary – in October 2012, their soldiers shot her in the head in an attempt to kill her. The world was appalled by what happened to Malala and she quickly won the support of millions more people when she continued her work and became the youngest person ever to win the world-famous Nobel Peace Prize.

“Let us pick our books and our pens. They are the most powerful weapons”