Malala pledges daily fight for 122 million out-of-school girls

Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai on Saturday vowed to continue her daily fight for 122 million girls still out of school.

“I’ll keep fighting for them every day,” said Yousafzai in an Instagram post.

She added that her journey to provide education to every girl started with fighting for her journey to get education, saying, “it has become a mission” to ensure education for every girl.

“When I was 11 years old, I had to stand up for my right to go to school in Mingora, Pakistan — where the Taliban banned girls’ education,” she recalled her story.

The education activist was shot by the outlawed Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in 2012 when she was a schoolgirl.

The Nobel laureate added that she had realised, even at that time, that the struggle was bigger than just her education.

Afghanistan is the only country in the world where girls and women are banned from going to school and university.

Since returning to power in 2021, the Afghan Taliban government in Kabul has imposed strict rules that the United Nations has called "gender apartheid".

Pakistan is facing its severe education crisis with more than 26 million children out of school, mostly as a result of poverty, according to official government figures — one of the highest figures in the world.

Malala became a household name after she was attacked by the TTP militants on a school bus in the remote Swat valley in 2012.

She was evacuated to the United Kingdom and went on to become a global advocate for girls' education and, at the age of 17, the youngest Nobel Peace Prize winner.