Malala calls Canada her ‘second home’
Nobel Peace Prize laureate tells T.O. audience she’s inspired by stories of refugee women
When Malala Yousafzai meets young women in refugee camps, she doesn’t impart her advice to them on how to change the world. She listens.
“They inspire me, instead,” the 20year-old Nobel Prize laureate, activist and author told a packed auditorium at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre on Friday. “I don’t think they need my advice.” Yousafzai was the keynote speaker at The Art of Leadership for Women conference hosted by a global business conference organizer.
The day-long event featured talks by former PC interim-leader Rona Ambrose, authors including Annie McKee ( How to be Happy at Work), and female business leaders in a bid to empower women with tools and techniques shared by the various speakers.
Yousafzai thanked the audience for welcoming her back to Canada which she called a second home.
She joked about being away from her parents for the first time as a student at Oxford University, proudly hailing it the best university in the world, before diverting to the more sombre subject of the 130 million young girls who may not get the opportunity to higher education because they are not in school.
“One thing that’s giving me hope is that people are at least talking about education, and not just education, but safe, quality, 12-years-of education,” she said, evolving from the UN Millennium Development Goals that focused on primary education.
Yousafzai travels the world as an advocate for girls to have a full 12 years of quality education, a reality that does not exist for millions, including girls in countries such as Nigeria, Lebanon and Syria, among other conflict-afflicted countries. Even where young women can go to school, the disparities between the educational opportunities given to men can be stark.
Yousafzai returned to Pakistan and to her village for the first time in five years in March after she fled when she was shot by the Taliban in Mingora.
“There is no secondary school, so we decided we will build one … The school has been built. It has started. Girls are going to that school, and it’s a state of the art school that is actually bringing change in that whole village,” she said.
The project was made possible by the Malala Fund, founded in 2013, to work in marginalized regions to create adequate secondary school choices and provide access to education for girls.
The fund works to increase its army of “Gul Makai” champions (women education activists), a term she coined for the pen name she used when blogging for the BBC in Taliban-controlled areas.
Yousafzai said her mission will complete when she can wake up in the morning and proclaim, “Wow, no one is out of school today!”