Malala Yousafzai

Malala Yousafzai (born 12 July 1997) is a Pakistani female education activist, and producer of film and television. She is the youngest Nobel Prize laureate in history, receiving the Peace Prize in 2014 at age 17, and is the second Pakistani and the only Pashtun to receive a Nobel Prize. Yousafzai is a human rights advocate for the education of women and children in her native district, Swat, where the Pakistani Taliban had at times banned girls from attending school. Her advocacy has grown into an international movement, and according to former prime minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, she has become Pakistan's "most prominent citizen".

The daughter of the education activist Ziauddin Yousafzai, she was born to a Yousafzai Pashtun family in Swat and was named after the Afghan folk heroine Malalai of Maiwand. Considering Bacha Khan, Barack Obama, and Benazir Bhutto as her role models, she was also inspired by her father's thoughts and humanitarian work. In early 2009, when she was 11, she wrote a blog under her pseudonym Gul Makai for the BBC Urdu to detail her life during the Taliban's occupation of Swat. The following summer, the journalist Adam B. Ellick made a New York Times documentary about her life as the Pakistan Armed Forces launched Operation Rah-e-Rast against the militants in Swat. In 2011, she received Pakistan's first National Youth Peace Prize [ar]. She interned for the Swat Relief Initiative, a foundation founded by Zebunisa Jilani, a princess of the Royal House of Swat which supports schools and clinics. She rose in prominence, giving interviews in print and on television, and was nominated for the International Children's Peace Prize by activist Desmond Tutu.