Malala's IWPR Roots

In 2009, Malala Yousafzai was a 12-year-old trainee in IWPR’s Open Minds Pakistan youth programme. The pioneering scheme worked in schools in the region to help young people engage in constructive discussion on social issues through journalism, public debate and dialogue. 

Having been trained by IWPR, she went on to contribute to the Open Minds project as a peer educator. At the time, she said that she and her contemporaries learned “how to express ourselves to [the] media, how to express the problems of others through the media. We learned so much through these trainings”.

Malala’s school, headed by her father Ziauddin Yousafzai, was a partner in the IWPR’s Open Minds Schools Network, and she gained a global audience through blogs and other media for her passionate defence of girls’ education amid extremist violence and repression in the country’s Swat Valley.

Malala’s father had become known for standing up to the Taleban in Swat during periods of violence. A key part of the Taleban effort to impose their hard-line views in Swat was closing down girls’ schools.

“Those were the most terrible days – the darkest in our history,” he told IWPR in 2009. “We spared no efforts to speak up against terrorism and that struggle brought us into the limelight.”

Malala Yousafzai at age 12 talks about taking part in IWPR’s Open Minds Pakistan project.

The Open Minds project identified and nurtured some of Pakistan’s most promising youth leaders, including Malala, through a media training and public debating programme that taught participants to use journalism skills to gather, analyse and disseminate information.

In 2012, Malala was dramatically airlifted to the UK following an assassination attempt by the Pakistani Taleban that also wounded two of her classmates.

Two years later, she became the youngest person ever to receive the Nobel Prize for Peace, and continues to serve as a global advocate for girls’ education and human rights.