Coin Press - Malala Yousafzai 'overwhelmed and happy' to be back in Pakistan

The education activist was shot by the Pakistani Taliban in 2012 when she was a schoolgirl and has returned to the country only a handful of times since.

"I'm truly honoured, overwhelmed and happy to be back in Pakistan," she told AFP as she arrived at the conference in the capital Islamabad.

The two-day summit was set to be opened Saturday morning by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, and brings together representatives from Muslim-majority countries, where tens of millions of girls are out of school.

Yousafzai is due to address the summit on Sunday.

"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 & girls," she posted on social media platform X on Friday.

The country's 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 Taliban government there has imposed an austere version of Islamic law 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.

Yousafzai became a household name after she was attacked by Pakistan Taliban 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.

L.K.Baumgartner--CPN