COVER STORY ASIA'S 100 MOST POWERFUL WOMEN
MALALA
YOUSAFZAI
Citizenship/Residence
Pakistan
Malala Yousafzai, the
youngest-ever Nobel Prize
laureate, the Pakistani
schoolgirl who stood up to
the Taliban and defended her
right to an education nabbed
the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize.
She is known mainly for
human r ights advocacy for
education and for women
in her native Swat Valley in
the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa
province of northwest
Pakistan, where the local
Taliban had at times banned
girls from attending school.
Yousafzai’s advocacy
has since grown into an
international movement.
“I don’t fear death, I fear remaining silent in the face of injustice”
A young Afghan woman who set up a secret underground school for
girls under the Taliban and – when they were toppled – cast off the
burka, ran for parliament, and took on the religious fundamentalists.
Malalai Joya is an activist, writer, and a former politician from
Afghanistan. She served as a Parliamentarian in the National Assembly
of Afghanistan from 2005 until early 2007, after being dismissed for
publicly denouncing the presence of warlords and war criminals in
the Afghan Parliament. She has been awarded on several paradigms,
November 4, 2010, As part of the Forbes The World’s Most Powerful
People package, The World’s Seven Most Powerful Feminists,
Foreign Policy Magazine listed Malalai Joya in its annual list of the
Top 100 Global Thinkers, The Guardian listed her among “Top 100
women: activists and campaigners” to name a few. Title of Joya’s
autobiography “Raising My Voice”, was published in the US/Canada
under the title of “A Woman Among Warlords”
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Up Till October 15, 2015
MALALAI
JOYA
Citizenship/Residence
Afghanistan