Malala visits women in flood camps in Pakistan

Malala visits women in flood camps in Pakistan

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Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai met with victims of the devastating monsoon floods in Pakistan on Wednesday, only the second visit to her home country since she was shot dead by the Taliban ten years ago.

Disastrous floods this summer submerged a third of Pakistan, displacing eight million people and causing at least $28 billion in damage.

Yousafzai visited camps in rural Sindh province, where she met families who have fled their submerged villages.

“The scale of the destruction is astounding and the psychosocial and economic impact on people’s lives, especially women and girls, cannot be overstated,” Yousafzai said in a statement released by her organization, the Malala Fund.

“World leaders need to step up, accelerate their response plans and mobilize the resources needed to help Pakistan rebuild and assist the affected population.”

The Malala Fund has pledged up to $700,000 to organizations in Pakistan.

The education of more than three million children has also been disrupted, while thousands of schools have been damaged.

Authorities are also battling a health crisis from malaria, dengue fever and malnutrition that has erupted among flood victims living in thousands of makeshift camps across the country.

Yousafzai was 15 years old when the Pakistani Taliban – an independent group that shares an ideology with the Afghan Taliban – shot her in the head over their campaign for girls’ education in the Swat Valley.

Flown to the UK for life-saving treatment, she later became an advocate for global learning and the youngest-ever Nobel Peace Prize winner.

The militant group known as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) waged a years-long insurgency that ended in a major military crackdown in 2014.

But since the Taliban returned to power in Kabul last year, the group has resurfaced in the region. Thousands of people protested against the worsening security situation on Tuesday.

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