Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai said she was “overwhelmed” to be back in her native Pakistan on Saturday as she arrived for a global summit on girls’ education in the Islamic world. The education activist was shot dead by Pakistani Taliban militants in 2012 when she was a schoolgirl, and has returned to the country only a few times since then.
“I’m really honoured, overwhelmed and happy to be back in Pakistan,” she told AFP as she arrived at the conference in the capital Islamabad with her parents.
The two-day summit brings together representatives from Muslim-majority countries, where millions of girls are out of school.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif was scheduled to address attendees, including local schoolgirls and university students, on Saturday morning.
“Finally we have taken a good initiative on the education of Muslim girls,” said Zahra Tariq, 23, who is studying clinical psychology.
“People in rural areas are still facing problems. In some cases their families are the first hurdle,” he told AFP.
Yousafzai is due to address the summit on Sunday and said she would focus on Afghanistan – the only country in the world where girls and women are banned from going to school and university.
He posted on social media platform on Friday
Pakistan’s Education Minister Khalid Maqbool Siddiqui told AFP that the Taliban government in Afghanistan had been invited to participate, but Islamabad had received no response.
Since returning to power in 2021, the Afghan Taliban government has imposed a strict version of Islamic law that the United Nations has called “gender apartheid.”
According to official government figures, Pakistan is facing its own serious education crisis, with more than 26 million children out of school – one of the highest figures in the world – mostly as a result of poverty.
Yousafzai became a household name after she was attacked by Pakistani Taliban militants on a school bus in the remote Swat Valley in 2012.
Insurgency was widespread in the region at the time as there was a war going on between the Afghan Taliban and NATO forces across the border in Afghanistan. The Pakistani and Afghan Taliban are separate groups, but share close ties and similar ideologies, including a deep distrust of educating girls.
Yousafzai was evacuated to the United Kingdom after her attack and became a global advocate for girls’ education and became the youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate at the age of 17.
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