2025 Skoll World Forum Part 1
2025 Skoll World Forum Part 2
2025 Skoll World Forum Part 3
2025 Skoll World Forum Part 5
By Alliance for Sustainability President Terry Gips
One of the highlights of the Skoll World Forum for me was the uplifting and empowering plenary on the fight for the right for girls to be educated, something many of us now take for granted in the US but which has been blocked in countries under Taliban control.
This powerful session was facilitated by Ireland’s former President Mary Robinson with Malala Yousafzai, the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize laureate at the age of 17, the youngest ever recipient, and Shabana Basij-Rasikh, Co-Founder and President of the impressive and impactful School of Leadership Afghanistan (SOLA).
Before jumping right into their important call for us all to speak up, I feel it’s important to first share their incredible stories.
The Roots of the Extraordinary Youth Leadership of Malala, a Model Gift from Her Father
Most of us have heard how 15-year-old Malala was on a bus in Pakistan after taking a school exam and was shot in the head (October 9, 2012) by a Taliban gunman in an assassination attempt targeting her because of her activism for girls’ education.
But few of us know about her background before the shooting. As Wikipedia points out, she was born into a lower-middle-class Sunni Muslim family and given her first name Malala (meaning “grief-stricken”) after Malalai of Maiwand, a famous Pashtun poet and warrior woman from southern Afghanistan. She was soon to live up to her name.
Malala was educated mostly by her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, a poet, school head and ardent educational activist. He encouraged Malala as a young girl to speak out about education rights for girls. At the age of 11, he took her to a local press club that featured her talk and she said, “How dare the Taliban take away my basic right to education?”
The speech was widely covered by newspapers and television channels. It began an activist path that led to her anonymously blogging about the Taliban’s occupation for BBC Urdu and then being featured in a New York Times documentary about her life.
This all took place amidst Pakistani Taliban militants taking over the Swat Valley, banning television, music, girls’ education and even women from going shopping. The Taliban had already blown up more than 100 girls’ schools.
An Undaunted Malala Confronts the Taliban – A Huge Victory and Award
Malala spoke out against the Pakistani Taliban on the national current affairs show Capital Talk and three days later the Taliban lifted the ban on women’s education. Girls were allowed to attend school until exams but had to wear burqas.
Pakistan’s Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani awarded her the National Peace Award for Youth. At Malala’s request, she directed authorities to set up an IT campus in the Swat Degree College for Women, and a secondary school was renamed in her honor. By 2012, at the age of 15, Malala was already planning to organize the Malala Education Foundation, which would help poor girls go to school.
The Taliban Death Threat Made Real and Malala’s Rise to Greater Heights and the Nobel Prize
As Malala’s prominence and voice grew, she became an increasing threat to the Taliban. She began receiving death threats on Facebook and in newspapers. By the summer of 2012, Taliban leaders unanimously agreed to kill her.
Sometimes the horrific, seemingly unbearable tragedy experienced by one person can re-birth that individual so that they rise up from the ashes to stand even stronger and build a powerful movement. That’s what happened for Malala after a long hospital recovery as her resilience blossomed into the remarkable force of nature, grace, passion and equanimity Malala is today.
This was reflected in her speech to the UN about the need for worldwide access to education on her 16th birthday, July 12, 2013. This was her first speech after the attack and reflects some of her remarkably mature, “old soul” and non-violent wisdom she learned from her heroes Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King:
The terrorists thought they would change my aims and stop my ambitions, but nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born … I am not against anyone, neither am I here to speak in terms of personal revenge against the Taliban or any other terrorist group. I’m here to speak up for the right of education for every child. I want education for the sons and daughters of the Taliban and all terrorists and extremists.
She wrote a widely-read memoir, I Am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban that was published in October, 2013.
The following year, Malala was awarded the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize at the age of 17, the youngest Nobel Prize laureate in history.
The Force of Malala Was Felt at Skoll – Her Apple TV+ Documentary
Mary Robinson asked Malala about her championing girls and women in Afghanistan through a documentary she produced last year, Bread and Roses, which is now on Apple TV+. Malala explained how she wanted to “have people see what is actually happening in Afghanistan.”
Malala chose to focus on three working Afghan women, all of whom lost their jobs due to the Taliban, “along with every other right.” One of them was Dr. Zahara, who had worked hard to be a dentist. She had just opened her clinic but “had to hide any sign that mentioned she was female.” Her clinic had to close but actually changed into a place for organizing protests, which they did each and every day.
Sadly, Malala said “The situation has only worsened since this documentary was completed” as “the Taliban have issued more than 100 decrees and edicts taking away any possible right or opportunity you can think of from women and girls.”
Gender Apartheid
Malala then said one of the most powerful statements of the entire Forum: “Afghan activists and other human rights lawyers are calling it gender apartheid because this is beyond just gender discrimination. This is systematic oppression at such a high scale that we need the right word for it, to recognize it and then hold perpetrators like the Taliban accountable for it.”
Shabana and the School of Leadership, Afghanistan
Shabana Basij-Rasikh is the co-founder and President of the School of Leadership, Afghanistan (SOLA), the first and only boarding school for Afghan girls. It operated in Kabul from 2016 through 2021, when the Taliban returned to power with its violent acts and harsh decrees against women, including the denial of education for girls.
Shabana had to lead the evacuation of her entire school community from Afghanistan. She settled SOLA in Rwanda where it could re-establish its operations and students could study. In 2024 she led its expansion into the digital realm with the launch of SOLAx, a WhatsApp-based online academy with nearly 15,000 students enrolled.
Shabana is a 2011 magna cum laude graduate of Middlebury College and holds a Master in Public Policy from Oxford. In 2018, she was awarded the Malalai Medal, one of Afghanistan’s highest national honors, for her work promoting girl’s access to education.
The Deeply Disturbing Situation for Women in Afghanistan
As you can see in the video from the Forum, Sobhana commented, “The situation in Afghanistan is horrifying right now. March 2022 was when Taliban legally banned girls from attending secondary school. In December 2022, women were legally banned from attending higher education.” She went on to share how dire the situation has become:
“They have issued decrees after decrees restricting women’s rights. If you’re a woman in Afghanistan today you cannot go to parks, you cannot go to the gym, you cannot drive, you cannot have a license, you cannot speak in the public, you cannot be seen by male doctors and, most recently, women cannot train to be midwives or doctors. That’s today.”
She then reminded the audience how thriving and hopeful things were in the time period between the first Taliban and its current regime, “We had incredible progress…young girls were going to school. Women were thriving as activists, as civil servants, as entrepreneurs, as business owners, as civil society leaders, as people who really cared about elevating life for everyone.”
At the same time, she explained that everything wasn’t so great even before the Taliban took over. She pointed to a 2017 Human Rights Watch report saying that 63% of high school age Afghan girls were not in school. “It was against that backdrop that we founded the first and only boarding school for girls in Afghanistan.”
The Creation of SOLA
Sobhana shared how she began the school in 2008 but it became a boarding school in 2016. She brought girls from many different provinces with different backgrounds and created a “sisterhood” which still exists. They had a school of nearly 100 girls representing 28 of the 34 provinces.
However, In August 2021 the Taliban took over and “we evacuated to Rwanda…the entire school community”. This story was shared in a segment on 60 Minutes.
Sobhana said they created the WhatsApp School “quite simply because of demand. We cannot bring all of those girls” who want to attend. This is their attempt to “deliver education to those girls who have to borrow a smart phone from a family member 30 minutes a day or a week. Today we have close to 19,000 learners from every single province.
The Malala Fund and Empowering Active Resistance to the Taliban by Learning
Malala shared that the “Malala Fund has been helping with education of girls in Afghanistan” through the Afghanistan initiative, which is doing “grant making and advocacy around the gender apartheid campaign supporting the Afghan woman activists, most of whom are in exile. There are amazing talented activists using everything out there to make education accessible.”
She added, “While the Taliban keep girls out of school, we need to do everything that we can in our capacity to take education to girls’ homes. Let’s make it impossible for the Taliban to stop a girl from learning. This is a form of resistance right now for those girls to keep learning.”
Malala pointed out that “When a girl picks up a book and is learning, she feels like she is fighting against something…fighting against this oppressive regime that’s trying to do everything to stop her from learning, from following her dreams.”
South Africa and Our Role in Supporting the Resistance Against Gender Apartheid
It was interesting to hear Malala’s connection to South Africa: “We have a lot of our allies from South Africa which is a really important country in this campaign. Last year I gave the Nelson Mandela lecture and that’s when I called everybody to support Afghan woman activists in calling what the Taliban are doing a gender apartheid.
“We must hold them accountable for these crimes. We can not normalize relations with them…They’re committing the worst crimes and they’re making it a crime for a girl to enter a classroom and for a woman to work.”
A Troubling Warning, Malala’s Dream and Call to Action for the Future of Girls and Women
Malala was asked was asked about her vision and call to action: “My dream is that I want it to be a crime for a girl to be banned from school.”
She emphasized, “It’s the scale of the oppression…This is systematic oppression and this is complete erasure of women from public life…as if women do not even exist.”
She then expanded her focus with a troubling warning: “What really worries me is about the future of women and girls everywhere, all the way from Pakistan to even in the UK and US or every country in the world…How vulnerable we are that tomorrow if an oppressive regime takes control in our country everything can be taken back from us. From our body rights to our right to work and education.”
Many of us attendees were struck that this was not about some far away place, but in our own countries, as evidenced by actions of the Trump administration. Malala drove the point further:
“We should not consider this challenge in Afghanistan, this gender apartheid system…as a distant issue. We should think about this collectively. This should be our shared commitment…We ask our leaders to hold the Taliban accountable for what they’re doing, which is gender apartheid.”
How Shabana Deals with Difficulty – Thinking about the Future – And Her Call to Action
When asked what keeps her going, Shabana shared, “When it gets really difficult I think about a future: I think about an Afghan father waking up in the morning preparing breakfast for his daughter and sending her off to school. That being the most ordinary thing. That’s an extraordinary reality today. It’s not existing.”
She added, “My call to action is don’t look away. What’s that mean? Afghan woman are fighting. They’re not giving up. They’re educating girls in secret. Families are sending their daughters outside of Afghanistan in pursuit of education, understanding they might not see them again. They’re working every day to keep that light on for their daughters for the future of Afghanistan.
“I sit here as a product of that Afghan womens’ bravery. I was educated in the living room of an Afghan woman who risked her life and the life of every single member of her family to educate girls life me during the first Taliban regime.
“There are incredible women who are outside of Afghanistan fighting for Afghan girls and womens’ rights in Afghanistan. And a lot of Afghan women and men in Afghanistan who are fighting for that future.”
Shabana concluded with a request for all of us to recognize the intense battle taking and the importance of addressing it, even if it may seem far away: “Educated Afghan women always have been and always will be our best allies. So don’t look away.”