MALALA YOUSAFZAI, the Pakistani teenage education activist who survived a near-fatal attack by the Taliban, and her family have become millionaires due to sales of a book about her life and appearances on the global speaker circuit.
Yousafzai, 18, the youngest person to win the Nobel peace prize, made international headlines after emerging defiant from the assassination attempt on a school bus in Pakistan’s Swat valley in October 2012 to continue her fight for girls’ rights.
She received medical treatment in the UK, where she now lives with her family. The teenager is in constant demand globally, charging $152,000 per speech compared with Desmond Tutu’s
reported $85,000, according to US based Institute for Policy Studies.
Her memoir, I Am Malala, published in 2013, has sold 287,170 copies in Britain, with a total value of about £2.2 million, and over 1.8 million copies worldwide, according to a spokesman from Nielsen Book Research.
While Yousafzai has set up the Malala Fund to support girls’ education projects in developing countries, her family also established a company, Salarzai Ltd, in 2013 to protect the rights to her life story.
Publically available information shows that the London-based company, owned by Yousafzai, her father Ziauddin Yousafzai, and her mother, Toor Pekai, has a net worth of £1.87 million in August 2015, up nearly 65 per cent from the previous year.
“Since the publication of Malala’s book, Malala and her family have donated more than $1 million to charities, mostly for education-focused projects across the world, including Pakistan,”
Yousafzai’s family said in a statement.
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