Malala: A Changemaker for Education

Malala: A Changemaker for Education

In honor of March being Women’s History Month, and to start off our Education Heroes series of posts, this post is dedicated to Malala Yousafzai – an activist and advocate for education equality.

Malala’s story starts on the day she was born on July 12, 1997. She was born in Mingora, Pakistan, a country that doesn’t usually celebrate the birth of girl children – however, her father, Ziauddin, chose to celebrate her anyways.

Ziauddin was a schoolteacher and Malala loved to learn. But in 2008, a Muslim extremist group called the Taliban took over Malala’s village and radically changed the rules. Some of the rules included bans on music and dancing, owning a TV, and girls going to school. Instead, women and girls were forced to stay in their homes.

Malala knew these rules were not right, so she openly spoke out against these injustices. She did so by blogging for the BBC Urdu about life under the Taliban rule. She was also in a New York Times documentary about the same while the Pakistani military was intervening on the Taliban. This speaking out led to the tragedy that occurred in October 2012: when Malala was on her way home from school, the bus she was on got pulled over and a masked gunman got on and asked, “Who is Malala?” The man ended up shooting Malala in the head and she was transported to a hospital in Birmingham, England. The incident made headlines worldwide.

Once she recovered, she decided to use her new international platform to continue to fight for the rights of girls around the world in similar situations. She started her own nonprofit called the Malala Fund, which helps gives girls around the world the opportunity to go to school. She also wrote a biography called My Name is Malala and was featured in a documentary with the same name. In 2014, she became the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Today, she is studying at the University of Oxford while continuing to publicly speak and travel the world for her mission.

According to the Malala Fund, over 130 million girls are out of school today and we want to continue to help shrink that number. Our beliefs at Yours Humanly align with those of Malala, as we want to see every child be given a quality education. We look up to Malala and all that she has accomplished and will continue to work for her cause.

Source: Malala Fund