Malala Yousafzai - Bad Girls Throughout History: 100 Remarkable Women Who Changed the World - Ann Shen

Bad Girls Throughout History: 100 Remarkable Women Who Changed the World - Ann Shen (2016)

Malala Yousafzai

At seventeen, Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai (1997-) became the youngest Nobel Peace Prize winner ever for her work supporting girls’ education rights. Raised in the northwest Swat Valley region of Pakistan, Yousafzai lived under increasing Taliban rule, which included banning girls from attending school. Her father is an education activist and operated a private girls’ school in the region, which helped ignite her passion for equal access to education. At the age of eleven and using a pseudonym, Yousafzai wrote a blog for BBC Urdu about her life under Taliban occupation. In 2012, her story was featured in a New York Times documentary. When her identity was revealed, Yousafzai became a target of the Taliban, and a fatwa (an Islamic religious decree) was issued against her and her work. On October 9, 2012, while taking the bus home from school, Yousafzai was shot in the head by a masked Taliban gunman. She survived the assassination attempt, and after several months of recovery became an international advocate and speaker for children’s rights to education. Her incredible courage inspired the rest of the world to act; the UN passed a petition in her name that led to Pakistan’s ratifying its first Right to Education Bill. Yousafzai then started the Malala Fund, a non-profit that empowers girls to raise their voices and provides access to education, and on her eighteenth birthday she used the money raised to open a school in Lebanon for Syrian refugees. The journey of this powerhouse bad girl is just beginning.

Stands for books, not bullets