L'engagement et la citoyenneté

« The girl who refused to be silent » — school magazine, Year 10

Malala Yousafzai was born on 12 July 1997 in Mingora, a town in the Swat Valley, in the north of Pakistan. Her father, Ziauddin, ran a school and believed that girls had the same right to education as boys. When Malala was eleven, an extremist group took control of the valley and banned girls from going to school. Malala refused to accept this: she wrote an anonymous blog for the BBC about her daily life and spoke out on television.

On 9 October 2012, a gunman stopped her school bus and shot her in the head. Malala survived. She was flown to a hospital in Birmingham, England, where she recovered and where her family settled.

Instead of hiding, she campaigned even more. On her sixteenth birthday, she gave a speech at the United Nations: « One child, one teacher, one book and one pen can change the world. » In 2013, she created the Malala Fund, a charity that raises money for girls' education. In 2014, aged seventeen, she became the youngest person ever to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

Today, Malala continues to stand up for the 120 million girls who still cannot go to school. « I tell my story, » she says, « not because it is unique, but because it is not. »