Malala Yousafzai is an education activist, champion for girls’ access to sports and play, and the youngest Nobel Prize laureate in history. Listen in to hear from Malala about her most recent project — investing in women's sports — in conversation with Leila Fadel, host of NPR’s Morning Edition, who graciously agreed to come out to Aspen for this special event.
Announced last summer, Malala has launched a new initiative to drive equality through athletic opportunity. Co-founded with her sports executive husband Asser Malik, Recess was inspired by her childhood in Pakistan. "I remember in school recess when boys would go off to the local cricket playground and girls had to stay behind," she shared in a CNN Sports interview. "From that point onwards, I knew that sports was something that girls did not have easy access to."
About the participants:
Malala Yousafzai’s lifelong mission is to create equal opportunities for girls so they can learn, thrive, and choose their own futures. Her work specifically focuses on the intersection of education, sports and storytelling. To achieve this, she has built a robust ecosystem: founding the nonprofit Malala Fund, starting the production company Extracurricular, and now launching a dedicated sports fund, Recess. She was born in Pakistan in 1997 and graduated from Oxford University in 2020.
Lelia Fadel is a host of NPR's Morning Edition, as well as NPR's morning news podcast Up First. As a national correspondent, Fadel consistently reported on the fault lines of this divided nation. Her "Muslims in America: A New Generation" series, in collaboration with National Geographic, won the prestigious Goldziher Prize in 2019. Previously, she was NPR's international correspondent based in Cairo and covered the wave of revolts in the Middle East and their aftermaths in Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, and beyond. Before joining NPR, Fadel covered the Middle East for The Washington Post as the Cairo Bureau Chief. Fadel is a Lebanese-American journalist who was raised in Saudi Arabia and Lebanon.
This event was hosted by the Aspen Public Radio Women’s Desk Network, which founded the Women’s Desk in 2025, the first at an NPR member station anywhere in the country. This Desk seeks a deeper understanding of the status of women through economic, sociocultural, regulatory, technological and news-making contexts, and includes a full-time reporter charged with centering women’s voices, to bring their perspectives and experiences to our local reporting efforts.
You can hear and read this ongoing reporting at aspenpublicradio.org/womens-desk.