17-Year-Old Malala Yousafzai Accepts Nobel Peace Prize

Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai called on world leaders to make education available to all children while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway, on Wednesday.

Yousafzai stressed the importance of not only primary education but also secondary school through her speech, at times both motivating and cheerful. She made sure to remind the world that she's just 17 years old.

"I'm the first Pakistani and the youngest person to receive this award," she said. "I am pretty certain that I am the only Nobel Peace Prize winner that still fights with her younger brothers."

Yousafzai called herself a "committed' and a sometimes "stubborn" person who wants to see every child get a quality education and see women have equal rights.

"Education is one of the blessings of life and one of its necessities," she said.

Yousafzai demanded world leaders to set new education goals.

"The world can no longer accept that basic education is enough," she said. "Why do leaders accept that for children in developing countries, only basic literacy is sufficient when their own children do homework in algebra, mathematics, science, and physics? Leaders must seize the opportunity to guarantee primary and secondary education for every child."

In 2012, a Taliban gunman shot Yousafzai in the head for her insistence that girls receive an education.

The education activist called on this generation to be the last one that sees empty classrooms and wasted potentials.

"Let's begin this ending now," she said.

Yousafzai brought a few of her friends, or as she called them her "sisters," to the ceremony and shared their stories. One girl was from Nigeria, where Boko Haram threatens and kills girls for wanting to go to school. Another girl is Syrian but lives in Jordan as a refugee.

"Though I appear as one girl, one person, who is 5-foot-2-inches tall if you include my heels, I am not a lone voice. I am many," she said. "I am Malala but I am also those 66 million girls who are deprived of education. I'm not raising my voice. It is the voice of those 66 million girls."

Yousafzai will give the prize money, approximately $700,000, to the Malala Fund in order to give girls quality education all over the world and raise their voices.

The first goal for the funds is "to build schools in Pakistan," she said. "This is where I will begin but it is not where I will stop. I will continue this fight until I see every child in school."

Indian child rights campaigner Kailash Satyarthi is also a recipient of the Noble Peace Prize this year.