Malala Yousafzai Turned 18 and Here’s What She Wants You to Do for Her
Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai turned 18 on July 12.
To celebrate the end of her childhood, she did not make a wish.
Nor did she ask for presents.
She asked for selfies. And she wants you to be a part of it.
Malala wants selfies for her birthday? That can’t be it.
That is it. That, and the fact that she is advocating for education for every child everywhere.
She is asking people to post a selfie with a book that changed their life using the hashtag #BooksNotBullets.
Inspired by the realization that it would take just eight days of global defense spending to pay for every child in the world to have both primary and secondary education, Malala’s goal is that people around the world join in to demand governments choose #BooksNotBullets.
Wait a minute. Eight days of global spending will cover the education of every child in the world?
According to Malala, yes. The money it would take to educate every child in the world for 12 years is equivalent to eight days of military spending — $39 billion.
At a speech given July 7 in Oslo, Norway, before UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, and assembled heads of states, the young Nobel laureate said the Millennium Development Goals are “too low.”
The Millennium Goals, developed by the United Nations, state that every child should have access to primary education. Malala asks the world to think bigger than this goal. She demands all children receive an education through the end of secondary school.
Why does Malala care about education so much?
Because she was shot by the Taliban for going to school and blogging for the BBC.
Malala Yousafzai is from the Swat Valley in Pakistan, where her family runs a chain of schools in the region. She has always been a strong advocate for children’s education, particularly for girls.
When she was 11, Malala started to write a blog for the Urdu version of BBC, detailing what it was like to live under Taliban occupation.
One day, the Taliban boarded a bus she was on, asked for her by name and shot her three times. Her desire for her own education, despite all obstacles, made her internationally famous as she slowly recovered from the shooting.
After her recovery, she gave a speech at the UN General Assembly in July 2013. She called for a war against illiteracy, poverty and terrorism. Her weapons? “One child, one teacher, one book and one pen can change the world. Education is the only solution.”
So, did Malala just go before Ban Ki-moon and other leaders, and tell them that they’re not doing enough?
Yes, she did. On behalf of children worldwide, including some of her own friends who have been denied an education and have had to get married early, plus others who have been kept from their classrooms by conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Palestine, Malala questioned world leaders at Oslo and said:
“World leaders need to be serious and think of the world as one country. World leaders need to think of the world’s children as their children. The dream was small so they achieved small. Nine years of education is not enough. If nine years of education is not enough for your children, it is not enough for the world’s children.”
Brief contributed by Karen Van Drie
