$2,000,000
Malala Yousafzai
Net Worth
Born in (City)
Mingora
Born in (Country)
Pakistan
Date of Birth
12th December, 1997
Date of Death
-
Mother
Tor Pekai Yousafzai
Father
Ziauddin Yousafzai
About
It seems only befitting that someone who once used the alias of “Valala Yousafzai” to safely pen his grievances with his college administration in India, is now writing about someone who used the same method to pen her struggles under the Taliban in Pakistan. I am of course talking about the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate- Malala Yousafzai, one of the only two Pakistanis to receive that honor. She lives to inspire the youth, and is particularly focused on making education available for girls all over the world and especially in the country of Pakistan where she started her fight for this just cause. The assassination attempt survivor and Oxford graduate uses her skill sets in speaking and writing, along with social media, as the means to this end. Her personal social media influence has extended up to 1.5 million followers on Instagram and 1.7 million followers on Twitter, and so has the list of topics for her activism as she now also fights for refugees and the environment among other things.
Early Life
Born on July 12, 1997, at Mingora city, located in the beautiful valley of the Swat District of Pakistan, she was reportedly named after Malalai of Maiwand, an Afghani female war hero who led the Afghan army to victory against the British in 1880. She lived there for the earlier part of her life with her educationist and activist father Ziauddin Yousafzai and mother Tor Pekai Yousafzai, along with her younger brothers Atal and Khushal Yousafzai. At Khushal Girls High School and College in Mingora, an establishment of her father that he also administered, Malala started quenching her thirst for knowledge. The disease of intolerance for female independence spread by the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP, or Pakistani Taliban) led by the radical extremist Maulana Fazlullah, that began banning everything from watching television to education for girls, led to her own defensive response that began in 2008 when she gave her “How Dare The Taliban Take Away My Basic Right To Education?” speech at a local press club in Peshawar with the guidance of her father- at just 11 years of age! It was right from the very first month of January of the following year of 2009 that really marked the start of the journey of Malala Yousafzai as a symbol for non-violent activism against radical Islam. In same month that the TTP ordered all girl\’s schools should be shut down in Swat, using the alias of Gul Makai (meaning cornflower in the Pashto language), Malala started writing about her daily struggles under the Taliban for BBC Urdu of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Till March, she submitted 35 entries which were then translated into English. This broadened the reach and popularity of her stories even further.
Road to Success
Malala’s interview by the host of “Capital Talk”, Hamid Mir, in February 2009 was her first television appearance. This was followed by the short documentary “Class Dismissed”, a combined effort with Adam Ellick of the New York Times, which they followed with “A Schoolgirl's Odyssey”- both available on the New York Times’ website. Then, her meeting with Richard Holbrooke, special US envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, asking for his assistance in her efforts, followed by several other media appearances, both local and abroad, began to make it apparent that she was the real person behind “Gul Makai” of BBC Urdu. She was officially outed for the whole world when Gul Makai was nominated for the International Children’s Peace Prize by Desmond Tutu. This brief moment of hope for a smooth path for her cause due to the positive responses from revered figures also included her receiving Pakistan’s first National Youth Peace Prize, later named after her as National Malala Peace prize in that same month of December 2011. In her sweet sixteen in 2013, she addressed the United Nation in New York about the bitter truths that girls still faced all over the world. There, the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon stamped 12th July as Malala Day. She made it to the list of Time’s most influential people of 2013, then started her journey as a book author when she co-authored her own memoir- “I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban”. Besides all this, in 2013 she was also awarded the United Nations Human Rights Prize, along with receiving the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought from the European Parliament. In 2014, at the age of 17, she became the youngest Nobel laureate as a Nobel Peace Prize winner.
Challenges
On Tuesday, October 2012, while the 15-year old was on her school bus with her friends, a masked gunman entered their bus. He asked for Malala, identified her, then fired three shots from the Colt 45 that he pointed at her. One bullet hit the left side of her forehead, shattering the bone there and lodging the shattered bone fragments into her brain. The bullet also passed through her face under her skin, causing nerve damage there that was apparent in her facial expressions in interviews afterwards, and then ended up lodged in her shoulder. However, her deteriorating condition after this, combined with concerns about her full recovery and threats from the TPP to finish their hit job, prompted her father and the army to choose Queen Elizabeth’s Medical Centre in Birmingham, UK, as her next medical destination from the long list of assistance offered by the sympathetic international community who had heard of the attack and her condition. The glory of her 2018 visit in Pakistan for the first time after her attack was however marred by Pakistani critics on social media platforms like Twitter who called her everything from a foreign agent working to make Pakistan look bad, to being less of a courage figure as compared to the other children and girls who still went to school in Swat after the Taliban shot her and she left the country.
Failures
Since entering university, Malala’s life has taken a more typical turn as a student following into 2018. As any 21-year old, Malala made errors and procrastinated like any other university student. She would hang out with her friends in their rooms till three in the morning, and would only start writing essays at 11pm, literally the eleventh hour, when it was due the next day! Her 2019 tweets about Kashmir were heavily criticized by Indians because while she highlighted the one side of hardships faced by Muslims in Kashmir, she failed to acknowledge the forced conversions and exodus of Hindus from that region.
Achievements
She was bestowed with ‘Sitara-e-Shujaat,’ Pakistan's third-highest civilian bravery award in October 2012.|In November 2012, she was presented with the ‘Mother Teresa Award for Social Justice.’|‘The Clinton Foundation’ presented her with the ‘Clinton Global Citizen Award’ in 2013.|The European Parliament honored her with the ‘Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought’ in 2013.|Won the Ellis Island International Medal of Honor in 2014|Won the One of Time Magazine "The 25 Most Influential Teens of 2014" in 2014|Won the Wonk of the Year 2017 from American University|Won the Harper's Bazaar inducted Malala in the list of "150 of the most influential female leaders in the UK" in 2017.
Quotes
- One child, one teacher, one book, one pen can change the world.
- When the whole world is silent, even one voice becomes powerful.
- If one man can destroy everything, why can't one girl change it?