Satyarthi is the first Indian to win a Nobel Peace prize. Although relatively unknown in his own country, the 60-year-old activist has been running a more than three decades long campaign in the field of child rights, especially fighting child trafficking.
Yousafzai, now 17, is a schoolgirl and education campaigner in Pakistan who was shot in the head by a Taliban gunman two years ago.
The Nobel jury said the prize was going to the two for “their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education."
Signalling its larger intent behind jointly awarding the prize, the Nobel Committee said it “regards it as an important point for a Hindu and a Muslim, an Indian and a Pakistani, to join in a common struggle for education and against extremism.”?
The decades-old rivalry between India and Pakistan is among the world’s most intractable border disputes, which is seen as a major source of instability in South Asian. The two countries have fought three wars since their independence from Britain in 1947.
Over the past week, Indian and Pakistani troops have exchanged heavy fire across their Himalayan border in one of the worst escalation of violence in recent years that killed some 17 people on both sides. The firing was said to have stopped on Friday.
Satyarthi’s organiSation, the New Delhi-based Bachpan Bachao Andolan, has been at the head of the fight against child labour by creating domestic and international consumer resistance to products made by bonded children, as well as with direct legal and advocacy work.
Through a number of training programmes, Satyarthi also helps children sold to pay their parents' debts to find new lives and serve as agents of prevention within their communities.
With the prize, Yousafzai, 17, becomes the youngest Nobel Prize winner, eclipsing Australian-born British scientist Lawrence Bragg, who was 25 when he shared the Physics Prize with his father in 1915.
Yousafzai was attacked in 2012 on a school bus in the Swat Valley in northwest Pakistan by masked gunmen as a punishment for a blog that she started writing for the BBC's Urdu service as an 11-year-old to campaign against the Taliban's efforts to deny women an education.
Unable to return to Pakistan after her recovery, Yousafzai moved to Britain, setting up the Malala Fund and supporting local education advocacy groups with a focus on Pakistan, Nigeria, Jordan, Syria and Kenya.
