Malala Yousafzai was joined by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex on Sunday to celebrate International Day of the Girl.
Live-streaming on YouTube, human rights activist Malala discussed with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle “the barriers preventing 130 million girls from going to school and why it’s essential that we champion every girl’s right to learn”.
Clearly passionate about the subject, Meghan discussed the importance of an education for women, especially to be able to prepare them later in life.
“When young girls have access to education everyone wins and everyone succeeds,” she said. “It just opens the door for societal success at the highest level.
“It’s not just robbing a society of the cultural richness that comes with educating young girls – it’s also robbing these young girls of childhood.”
The Duke of Sussex, along with his wife, also spoke in the discussion with Malala about the “critical” need for girls’ education.
“The importance of girls’ education to help defer climate change is absolutely critical,” he said.
The couple also discussed their 18-month-old son Archie Mountbatten Windsor and some of the milestones he has crossed.
Malala has continually advocated for girls’ rights to education. She rose to global prominence in 2012 after being shot in the head by Taliban gunmen as she boarded her school bus in north-west Pakistan.
The teen first became a target for the regime after defying a ban issued in 2009 forbidding girls to go to school and penning an anonymous blog for the BBC highlighting life under Taliban rule with a personal emphasis on women’s right to education.
She went on to become the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014, being just 17-years-old. The human rights activist went to go on to begin her studies at Oxford University in 2017, where she recently graduated from.
During her chat with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Malala also found out how Meghan and Harry have been able to spend more time as a family throughout the past few months.
“We were both there for his first steps,” Harry explained. “His first run, his first fall, his first everything.”
Meanwhile, Meghan also admitted she felt “fortunate” to be able to spend so much time with Archie, who was born in May 2019, during some formative years.
“In so many ways we are fortunate to be able to have this time to watch him grow, and in the absence of COVID-19, we would be travelling and working more,” she said. “We’d miss a lot of those moments.”
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