Malala Yousafzai was born in July 1997 in the town of Mingora, located in the Swat region of north-western Pakistan, which was controlled by the Taliban for several years. During this period, girls' schools were burned down and opponents of the regime were assassinated. Her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, a teacher and education activist, encouraged his daughter to fight against this oppression. At the age of 11, when she was no longer allowed to go to school, the young girl decided to write about her daily life as a schoolgirl on a blog on the BBC's English-language news website. She bore witness to the violence suffered by the population and the Taliban's attacks on schools, while demanding that girls should have the right to study without putting their lives in danger.
After the Pakistani army regained control of the region, her commitment to gender equality was finally recognised. In 2011, the country's leaders awarded her the National Peace Prize. On 9 October 2012, when Malala was 14 years old, she was the victim of an assassination attempt by members of the Pakistani Taliban as she left her school. Seriously injured in the neck and head, she was eventually transferred to a hospital in London, United Kingdom.
During her recovery, she received thousands of messages of support from around the world, becoming a symbol of resistance against injustice and the fight for women's rights worldwide. A year after the attack, in October 2013, Malala Yousafzai published her autobiography, ‘I Am Malala’, co-written with a journalist from The Sunday Times. In it, the young girl recounts her childhood as a schoolgirl in Pakistan, her attack, her exile in the United Kingdom and her fight for girls' education.
Since the attack, Malala has been living in the United Kingdom, where her parents and two younger brothers have joined her. The youngest laureat of the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded in 2014 at the age of 17, she is now a graduate of Oxford University and continues her fight for girls' education around the world. She has also been giving numerous international lectures for more than ten years. In 2017, the UN appointed her as a Messenger of Peace to raise public awareness of girls' education.
Today, with 129 million girls worldwide not attending school, Malala continues her fight. (1)
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(1)https://www.unicef.org/fr/education/education-des-filles
Sources:
- https://www.la-croix.com/international/pakistan-que-devient-malala-yousafzai-militante-pour-l-education-des-jeunes-filles-20250110
- https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malala_Yousafzai