Malala Yousafzai wins World Children’s Prize, donates prize money to rebuild Gaza school

Malala Yousafzai, the 17-year-old advocate for girls’ education, has donated $50,000 in prize money to rebuild a Gaza school that was damaged in the Israel-Hamas war. 

 

Yousafzai was awarded the World Children’s Prize in Stockholm on Wednesday, who then made the announcement to donate her winnings, Yousafzai was quoted as saying “without education, there will never be peace.”

 

The young woman gained international attention in 2012 after surviving a gunshot to the head in a Taliban attack. She had been arguing with a militant that girls deserved the same educational opportunities as boys. 

 

Yousafzai also became the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize for her advocacy against child slavery, extremism and child labor this year. 

In an interview to state broadcaster PTV along with her father and mother in the United Kingdom, she invited both the Prime Minister of Pakistan and India yet again to attend the award ceremony of Nobel Peace Prize to be held in December.

Malala said that she will spend her share of the $1.1 million prize money on educational projects in Pakistan, and set up a high quality school in Pakistan.

She insisted that the focus should be on educating girls, and believed that she has gained enough experience to continue advocating and urging people to invest in education.

“We have to work together, as 57 million children are still out of school in Pakistan. My dream is that every Pakistani child should get good quality education,” she added.

Malala was not expecting to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

“I was in my chemistry class and the teacher told me that I have won the Nobel Peace Prize,” she recalled. “All teachers and students gathered in the school assembly and I nervously made a little speech before them.”

“When I started working for education, my first project was a school for working children in Swat,” she revealed while talking about the Malala Fund. “The aim of Malala Fund is that children in Pakistan get education facilities.”

 

She is the first person to be awarded the World Children’s Prize and the Nobel Peace Prize in the same year.