Malala Yousafzai 'overwhelmed' on third visit to Pakistan

ISLAMABAD: Nobel Peace Prize winner and renowned activist Malala Yousafzai on Saturday after more than two years to attend the two-day global conference on girls' education in Islamabad as a special guest.

Expressing her views on her third visit to the country, Malala said: "I'm truly honoured, overwhelmed and happy to be back in Pakistan".

The education activist was shot by the outlawed Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in 2012 when she was a schoolgirl and has returned to the country only a handful of times since.

The two-day summit brings together representatives from Muslim-majority countries, where tens of millions of girls are out of school.

Malala is due to address the summit on Sunday (tomorrow).

"I will speak about protecting rights for all girls to go to school, and why leaders must hold the Taliban accountable for their crimes against Afghan women and girls," she posted on social media platform X on Friday.

Federal Education Minister Khalid Maqbool Siddiqui told AFP the Taliban government in Afghanistan had been invited to attend, but Islamabad has not received a response.

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 own 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.

The Nobel laureate's last visit was in 2022 when she arrived in the country along with her parents to visit the flood-affected areas to raise international awareness regarding the devastation caused by climate change in the South Asian nation.

Malala's first visit to Pakistan was back in March 2018 — more than five years after she left the country following the TTP attack.