Malala Yousafzai turned 18 on Sunday, and to mark the occasion, she opened a school for Syrian refugee girls in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley.
The school will be able to educate up to 200 girls between the ages of 14 to 18. "I decided to be in Lebanon because I believe that the voices of the Syrian refugees need to be heard and they have been ignored for so long," Yousafzai, the youngest ever winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, told Reuters.
In 2012, Yousafzai was shot by the Taliban in Pakistan for advocating girls' rights to education. She chose to open her new school in the Bekaa Valley because it is close to the Syrian border. Out of the 1.2 million refugees who have fled to Lebanon, 500,000 are school-age children, and only 20 percent are receiving formal education. "Today on my first day as an adult, on behalf of the world's children, I demand of leaders we must invest in books instead of bullets," Yousafzai said.
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