LONDON – Malala Yousafzai, the youngest person to win the Nobel peace prize, has donated more than $1 million to charities, promoting education across the world and defending rights of refugees.

“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 emailed to the Thomson Reuters Foundation, Reuters reported on Wednesday, October 26.

Malala rose to fame in 2009 for her anti-Taliban blog billed as “Gul Makai (cornflower) for the BBC against Taliban when she was merely 11.

However, many believe that her diaries were written by her father, Ziauddin an owner and principal of the school where Malala would study, in collaboration with the then BBC Urdu Service Bureau Chief.

Malal’s autobiography “I am Malala”  earned fame worldwide, however was struck in controversy in Malala’s  homeland with many dubbing her as a tool being exploited by the West to malign Islam and Pakistan under the guise of Taliban.

Published in 2013, her memoir has sold 287,170 copies in Britain with a total value of about 2.2 million pounds ($3 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.

Addressing world leaders at a conference in London earlier this year, Malala urged them to commit $1.4 billion to give Syrian refugee children access to education.

Malala told a crowd in London’s Trafalgar Square last week at a memorial for murdered British lawmaker Jo Cox that the opposition Labour MP “showed us all that you can be small and still be a giant”.

Cox, a strong supporter of refugee causes and staying in the European Union (EU), was shot and stabbed to death in her constituency in northern England a week before Britain voted to leave the EU.