At the age of 11, Yousafzai, the daughter of a school principal, became a blogger for the BBC and documented the growing influence of the Taliban, who wanted to ban girls’ education and were blowing up schools and closing others down in her home of Swat, in northern Pakistan.
In October 2012, a Taliban gunman stormed her school bus and shot her in the head as she sat with her friends — targeting her for her outspoken advocacy of girls’ education.
Yousafzai survived, made an astonishing recovery and settled with her family in England after receiving medical treatment there. She published a memoir, I Am Malala, and started the Malala Fund, which supports girls’ education around the world. She marked her 16th birthday with a speech at the United Nations. And she has continued to attend school.
The Nobel Prize, she joked on Friday, is “not going to help in exams.” Then she said: “I want to see every child going to school. There are still 57 million children who have not received education.”
What needs to be done to reach those unschooled children? Goats and Soda spoke with Jacqueline Bhabha, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and director of research at the university’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights who specializes in children’s rights.