Malala Yousafzai

Malala Yousafzai was born on July 12, 1997, in Mingora, Swat valley, Pakistan. She is a Pakistani activist who started at the age of eleven protesting the prohibition on the education of girls that was imposed by the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan. She gained global attention when she survived an assassination attempt by the Taliban at the age of 15. She was awarded the Noble Prize for Peace in 2014 with Kailash Satyarthi in recognition of their efforts on behalf of children's rights. When the Taliban invaded Swat Valley and started imposing strict Islamic law, they took away the right for women to have an active role in society. Thus, Yousafzai's school was shut down. When she was eleven years old, her father took her to a local press club in Peshawar to protest school closings on September 1, 2008. It was there she gave her first speech, "How Dare the Taliban Take Away My Basic Right to Education?". She gained national attention and when the Taliban officially closed her school on January 15, 2009, she continued to speak up and go on local news outlets to get her point across. By December of 2009, it was made clear that Yousafzai was recognized both nationally and internationally and was the BBC's young blogger.  In October of 2011, she was nominated by human rights activist Desmond Tutu for the International Children's Peace Prize. She then proceeded to win the award in December of that year and became Pakistan's first winner of the National Youth Peace Prize (later renamed the National Malala Peace Prize). On October 9, 2012, Yousafzai was shot in the head by a TTP gunman while she going home from school. The TTP took responsibility for the attack and she was flown from Peshawar to Birmingham. She survived the attack, and as a cause of it, protests broke out worldwide and her cause was taken up around the world, including by the UN special envoy for global education, Gordon Brown, who introduced a petition that called for all children around the world to have the ability to go back to school by 2015. That petition led to the ratification of Pakistan's first Right to Education Bill. the President of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, introduced the launch of a 10 million dollar education fund in Yousafzai's honor in December of 2012. During this time, the Malala Fund was established by the Vital Voices Global Partnership to support education for all girls around the world. Her notable accomplishments include winning the United Nations Human Rights Prize (awarded every five years) in 2013, being named one of Time Magazine's most influential people in 2013 (appeared on the cover as well), coauthoring a memoir with Christina Lamb called I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban in 2013, and she became the youngest person to be awarded a Liberty Medal, awarded by the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia to public figures who strive for people’s freedom throughout the world in 2014. She also won the Nobel Prize for Peace that same year, becoming the youngest to do so.