Taliban's attempts to deter girls from seeking an education backfiring
Mingora, Oct.15.─ The Pakistani Taliban's attempts to deter girls from seeking an education, epitomised by the shooting of 16-year-old Malala Yousafzai (foto) in the face last year, are backfiring as school enrolments surge in her home region.
While Yousafzai missed out last week on the Nobel Peace Prize, her plight is helping change attitudes in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, which lies at the centre of a Taliban insurgency. The four-month-old provincial government boosted education spending by about 30 per cent and began an enrolment drive that has added 200,000 children, including 75,000 girls.
Yousafzai's story "is certainly helping us to promote education in the tribal belt," Muhammad Atif Khan, the province's education minister, said. "Education is a matter of death and life. We can't solve terrorism issues without educating people."
Taliban militants targeted Yousafzai in retaliation over her campaign for girls to be given equal rights to schooling in a country where only 40 per cent of adult women can read and write.
Though the Nobel award went to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, Yousafzai was showered with accolades in a week in which she published her memoir ...
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