Malala Yousafzai speaks at the United Nations Youth Assembly in New York City on Friday. (AFP)

United Nations, July 12 (Agencies): Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager shot by the Taliban for promoting education for girls, has called on world leaders to provide free compulsory schooling for every child in a UN address timed to coincide with her 16th birthday.

Speaking today to youth leaders from more than 100 countries, she called for “a global struggle against illiteracy, poverty and terrorism”.

“Let us pick up our books and our pens,” she said. “They are our most powerful weapons. One child, one teacher, one book, and one pen can change the world. Education is the only solution.”

The UN has declared her birthday July 12 as “Malala Day”.

Wearing a pink head scarf, Malala told UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and nearly 1,000 students from around the world at the UN headquarters in New York that education was the only way to improve lives.

Malala was shot in the head at close range by gunmen in October as she left school in Pakistan’s Swat Valley, northwest of the country’s capital Islamabad, after campaigning against the Taliban efforts to deny women education.

She presented Ban with a petition signed by nearly four million people in support of 57 million children, who are not able to go to school, and demanding world leaders to fund new teachers, schools and books and end child labour, marriage and trafficking.

UN special envoy for global education and former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Friday’s event was a celebration not only of Malala’s birthday and her recovery, but also of her vision.

“Her dream that nothing, no political indifference, no government inaction, no intimidation, no threats, no assassin’s bullets should ever deny the right of every single child... to be able to go to school,” Brown said.

Pakistan has five million children out of school, a number only surpassed by Nigeria, which has more than 10 million children out of school, according to the UN cultural agency Unesco. Most of those are girls.

The Taliban had claimed responsibility for the assassination attempt on Malala, calling her efforts pro-western. Two of her classmates were also wounded.

She was treated in Britain, where doctors mended parts of her skull with a titanium plate. Unable to safely return to Pakistan, she started at a school in Birmingham in March.

Under Taliban rule in neighbouring Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, women were forced to cover up and banned from voting and leave their homes unless accompanied by a husband or male relative.