Malala Day

Every year on July 12, we celebrate Malala Day to honour the educational activist and Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai. In 2014, at the age of 17, she became the youngest Nobel laureate in the world. She was also the second person from Pakistan to win the award. For over a decade, Malala has consistently advocated the rights of women and children against the Pakistani Taliban, who often placed restrictions and bans on the educational rights of women in her homeland, Swat.

Malala Yousafzai was born on July 12, 1997, to a middle-class family in Pakistan. Even as a child, Malala was interested in politics and would stay awake at night to discuss these subjects with her parents, after her two younger brothers had gone to bed. Seeing his daughter’s engrossment in politics, Ziauddin, Malala’s father took her to Peshawar in 2008 to address a crowd at the local press club. During her speech, she raised the question of the Taliban banning educational rights for women. Her speech gained media attention all over the region. Soon after she started working as an educator in the Open Minds Pakistan youth programme of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting. The youth programme engaged in public debates and encouraged students to discuss political and social issues.

At the age of 11, Malala, under the pseudonym of Gul Makai, wrote a blog for the BBC Urdu detailing her life under the Taliban’s rule in Swat. She caught the world’s attention through the New York Times’s documentary of her life when Operation Rah-e-Rast was launched by the Pakistan Armed Forces. As of today, Malala is one of the most prominent activists in the world.