Bismillah hir rahman ir rahim. In the name of God,
the most merciful, the most beneficent.
Your Majesties, distinguished members of the
Norweigan Nobel Committee, dear sisters and brothers, today is a day of great
happiness for me. I am humbled that the Nobel Committee has selected me for
this precious award.
Thank you to everyone for your continued support and
love. I am grateful for the letters and cards that I still receive from all
around the world. Reading your kind and encouraging words strengthens and
inspires me.
I would like to thank my parents for their
unconditional love. Thank you to my father for not clipping my wings and for
letting me fly. Thank you to my mother for inspiring me to be patient and to
always speak the truth- which we strongly believe is the real message of Islam.
I am very proud to be the first Pashtun, the first
Pakistani, and the first young person to receive this award. I am pretty certain that I am also the first
recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize who still fights with her younger brothers.
I want there to be peace everywhere, but my brothers and I are still working on
that.
I am also honoured to receive this award together
with Kailash Satyarti, who has been a champion of children's rights for a long
time. Twice as long, in fact, than I have been alive. I am also glad that we
can stand together and show the world that an Indian and a Pakistani can be
united in peace and together work for
children's rights.
Dear brothers and sisters, I was named after the
inspirational Pashtun Joan of Arc, Malalai of Maiwand. The word Malala means
"grief stricken", "sad", but in order to lend some
happiness to it, my grandfather would always call me Malala - The happiest girl
in this world and today I am very happy that we are standing together for an
important cause.
This award is not just for me. It is for those
forgotten children who want education. It is for those frightened children who
want peace. It is for those voiceless children who want change.
I am here to stand up for their rights, raise their
voice ... it is not time to pity them. It is time to take action so it becomes the
last time that we see a child deprived of education.
I have found that people describe me in many
different ways.
Some people call me the girl who was shot by the
Taliban.
And some, the girl who fought for her rights.
Some people, call me a "Nobel Laureate"
now.
As far as I know, I am just a committed and stubborn
person who wants to see every child getting quality education, who wants equal
rights for women and who wants peace in every corner of the world.
Education is one of the blessings of life-and one of
its necessities. That has been my experience during the 17 years life. In my
home in Swat Valley, in the north of Pakistan, I always loved school and
learning new things. I remember when my friends and I would decorate our hands
with henna for special occasions. Instead of drawing flowers and patterns we
would paint our hands with mathematical formulas and equations.
We had a thirst for education because our future was
right there in that classroom. We would sit and read and learn together. We
loved to wear neat and tidy school uniforms and we would sit there with big
dreams in our eyes. We wanted to make our parents proud and prove that we could
excel in our studies and achieve things, which some people think only boys can.
Things did not remain the same. When I was ten,
Swat, which was a place of beauty and tourism, suddenly changed into a place of
terrorism. More than 400 schools were destroyed. Girls were stopped from going to school.
Women were flogged. Innocent people were killed. We all suffered. And our
beautiful dreams turned into nightmares.
Education went from being a right to being a crime.
But when my world suddenly changed, my priorities
changed too.
I had two options, one was to remain silent and wait
to be killed. And the second was to speak up and then be killed. I chose the
second one. I decided to speak up.
The terrorists tried to stop us and attacked me and
my friends on 9th October 2012, but their bullets could not win.
We survived. And since that day, our voices have
only grown louder.
I tell my story, not because it is unique, but
because it is not.
It is the story of many girls.
Today, I tell their stories too. I have brought with
me to Oslo, some of my sisters, who share this story, friends from Pakistan,
Nigeria and Syria. My brave sisters Shazia and Kainat Riaz who were also shot
that day in Swat with me. They went through a tragic trauma too. Also my sister
Kainat Somro from Pakistan who suffered extreme violence and abuse, even her
brother was killed, but she did not succumb.
And there are girls with me, who I have met during
my Malala Fund campaign, who are now like my sisters, my courageous 16 year old
sister Mezon from Syria, who now lives in Jordan in a refugee camp and goes
from tent to tent helping girls and boys to learn. And my sister Amina, from
the North of Nigeria, where Boko Haram threatens and kidnaps girls, simply for
wanting to go to school.
Though I appear as one girl, one person, who is 5
foot 2 inches tall, if you include my high heels. I am not a lone voice, I am
many.
I am Shazia.
I am Kainat Riaz.
I am Kainat Somro.
I am Mezon.
I am Amina. I am those 66 million girls who are out
of school.
People like to ask me why education is important
especially for girls. My answer is always the same.
What I have learnt from the first two chapters of
the Holy Quran, is the word Iqra, which means "read", and the word,
nun wal-qalam which means "by the pen"?
And therefore as I said last year at the United
Nations, "One child, one teacher, one pen and one book can change the
world."
Today, in half of the world, we see rapid progress,
modernisation and development. However, there are countries where millions
still suffer from the very old problems of hunger, poverty, injustice and
conflicts.
Indeed, we are reminded in 2014 that a century has
passed since the beginning of the First World War, but we still have not learnt
all of the lessons that arose from the loss of those millions of lives a
hundred years ago.
There are still conflicts in which hundreds of thousands
of innocent people have lost their lives. Many families have become refugees in
Syria, Gaza and Iraq. There are still girls who have no freedom to go to school
in the north of Nigeria. In Pakistan and Afghanistan we see innocent people
being killed in suicide attacks and bomb blasts.
Many children in Africa do not have access to school
because of poverty.
Many children in India and Pakistan are deprived of
their right to education because of social taboos, or they have been forced
into child labour and girls into child marriages.
One of my very good school friends, the same age as
me, had always been a bold and confident
girl and dreamed of becoming a doctor. But her dream remained a dream. At age
of 12, she was forced to get married and then soon had a son at an age when she
herself was a child - only 14. I know that my friend would have been a very
good doctor.
But she couldn't ... because she was a girl.
Her story is why I dedicate the Nobel Prize money to
the Malala Fund, to help give girls everywhere a quality education and call on
leaders to help girls like me, Mezun and Amina.
The first place this funding will go is where my heart is, to build
schools in Pakistan-especially in my home of Swat and Shangla.
In my own village, there is still no secondary
school for girls. I want to build one, so my friends can get an education-and
the opportunity it brings to fulfil their dreams.
That is where I will begin, but it is not where I
will stop. I will continue this fight until I see every child in school. I feel
much stronger after the attack that I endured, because I know, no one can stop
me, or stop us, because now we are millions, standing up together.
Dear brothers and sisters, great people,who brought
change, like Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa and Aung San
Suu Kyi, they once stood here on this stage. I hope the steps that Kailash
Satyarti and I have taken so far and will take on this journey will also bring
change - lasting change.
My great hope is that this will be the last time we
must fight for the education of our children. We want everyone to unite to
support us in our campaign so that we can solve this once and for all.
Like I said, we have already taken many steps in the
right direction. Now is the time to take a leap.
It is not time to tell the leaders to realise how
important education is - they already know it - their own children are in good
schools. Now it is time to call them to take action.
We ask the world leaders to unite and make education
their top priority.
Fifteen years ago, the world leaders decided on a
set of global goals, the Millennium Development Goals. In the years that have followed, we have seen
some progress. The number of children out of school has been halved. However, the world focused only on expanding
primary education, and progress did not reach everyone.
Next year, in 2015, representatives from around the
world will meet at the United Nations to decide on the next set of goals, the
Sustainable Development Goals. This will set the world's ambition for
generations to come. Leaders must seize this opportunity to guarantee a free,
quality primary and secondary education for every child.
Some will say this is impractical, or too expensive,
or too hard. Or even impossible. But it is time the world thinks bigger.
Dear brothers and sisters, the so-called world of
adults may understand it, but we children don't. Why is it that countries which
we call "strong" are so powerful in creating wars but so weak in
bringing peace? Why is it that giving guns is so easy but giving books is so
hard? Why is it that making tanks is so easy, but building schools is so
difficult?
As we are living in the modern age, the 21st century
and we all believe that nothing is impossible. We can reach the moon and maybe
soon will land on Mars. Then, in this, the 21st century, we must be determined
that our dream of quality education for all will also come true.
So let us bring equality, justice and peace for all.
Not just the politicians and the world leaders, we all need to contribute. Me. You. It is our duty.
So we must work ... and not wait.
I call upon my fellow children to stand up around
the world.
Dear sisters and brothers, let us become the first
generation to decide to be the last.
The empty classrooms, the lost childhoods, wasted
potential-let these things end with us.
Let this be the last time that a boy or a girl
spends their childhood in a factory.
Let this be the last time that a girl gets forced
into early child marriage.
Let this be the last time that an innocent child
loses their life in war.
Let this be the last time that a classroom remains
empty.
Let this be the last time that a girl is told
education is a crime and not a right.
Let this be the last time that a child remains out
of school.
Let us begin this ending.
Let this end with us.
And let us build a better future right here, right
now.
Thank you.
