Narrator: Malala Yousafzai was born in 1997 in the Swat Valley in northern Pakistan. Her father was a social activist and educator, and he named his daughter after a female hero who led the Afghan people to victory in an 1880 battle against the British. Narrator: Malala attended the girls’ school that her father had founded, but when the Swat Valley came under the control of the Taliban in 2007, the family, including her two younger brothers, had to leave. The Taliban is a political and religious group that follows a strict form of Islam. They do not believe that girls should attend a school or that women should play an active part in society. Upon the family’s return in 2008, Malala gave her first public speech, called “How dare the Taliban to take away my basic right to an education?” As the Taliban continued with their violent campaign of closing and destroying girls’ schools, Malala started to blog for the BBC under a different name. During the next few years, she made two documentaries with a US filmmaker about the local situation and met with United Nations workers. Her activism attracted global attention, including a nomination from South African archbishop Desmond Tutu for the International Children’s Peace Prize. Narrator: On the ninth of October 2012, Malala was traveling home from school when a Taliban gunman got onto her bus and asked, “Who is Malala?” She was shot in the head and had to be transferred to the UK for medical care. She and her family stayed in that country with relatives, and she continued her studies thereafter she got better. She did not visit Pakistan again until 2018. Narrator: The Taliban’s violent actions led to a new international focus on and action for girls’ educational rights, and Malala’s work was right at the heart of these efforts. In 2013, on her sixteenth birthday, she gave a speech at the United Nations in New York. She was also named one of Time magazine’s most influential people of the year and published her life...