The honour comes with a USD 100,000 award, which Yousafzai says she will spend in Pakistan on children who need education and other support
Pakistani teenager Malala Yousafzai awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to promote girls’ education brought her passion for learning to Philadelphia, where she received the Liberty Medal on Tuesday.
The Liberty Medal comes with a USD100,000 award, which Yousafzai said she will spend in Pakistan on children who need education and other support.
In accepting the honor, she implored world leaders to spend money on supporting learning, not wars, and to solve their differences with words.
“Education is the best weapon against poverty, ignorance and terrorism,” she said.
Seventeen-year-old Yousafzai recently became the world’s youngest Nobel laureate. Organisers of the Liberty Medal ceremony did not know that would be the case when they decided months ago to honor her. But the coincidence might have been expected as she has become the seventh medal recipient to subsequently receive the Nobel Peace Prize, including former South African President Nelson Mandela, former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan and former US president Jimmy Carter.
The medal is given annually at the NationalConstitutionCenter to someone who strives to secure freedom for people around the world.
Tuesday’s ceremony included speeches from women with powerful stories about education, including Minnijean Brown Trickey, who helped integrate an Arkansas high school in 1957, and University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann, a first-generation college student who rose to lead an Ivy League school.
Gutmann, also a board member of the ConstitutionCenter, praised Yousafzai for her “compelling vision and immense courage.”
“An educated mind is the most powerful force for good on our planet,” Gutmann said.
Yousafzai said that when the Taliban went to Pakistan’s SwatValley, where she lived with her family, she had two options – not speak and wait to be killed or speak and then be killed.
“Why should I not speak?” she said. “It is our duty.”
She said the Taliban “made a big mistake” trying to silence her. The day she was shot, she said, “Weakness, fear and hopelessness died, and strength, power and courage were born.”
Her appearance in Philadelphia came less than two weeks after she became the youngest Nobel laureate, sharing the prize with Kailash Satyarthi, a children’s rights activist from India.
The NationalConstitutionCenter is dedicated to increasing public understanding of the US Constitution and the ideas and values it represents.