Malala Yousafzai celebrated her 20th birthday this week by visiting and speaking with girls at a camp for displaced people in Iraq.

The visit to Iraq’s Hassan Shami camp, outside the recently liberated city of Mosul, is part of the young Pakistani activist’s “Girl Power Trip,” aimed at promoting education for women and girls around the world.

“We need to encourage girls that their voice matters,” Yousafzai said in an interview with TIME. “I think there are hundreds and thousands of Malalas out there.”

Yousafzai has made it a ritual of using her birthdays to highlight girls’ and women’s rights. The tradition started on her 16th birthday, when Yousafzai made her first public appearance after the Taliban attack that nearly killed her, in an address at the United Nations. After that, the UN officially declared her birthday, July 12, “Malala Day.”

This time last year the activist was visiting refugee girls in Kenya and Rwanda. The year before that she opened a secondary school for Syrian refugee girls in Lebanon. Her 17th birthday passed with a visit with the families of the victims of the Boko Haram kidnappings in Nigeria.

This year, Yousafzai met with Iraqi girls who lived under the self-proclaimed Islamic State and shared her own experience under the Taliban. “We were living in the same situation,” Yousafzai told the schoolgirls.

Yousafzai first gained prominence as a young girl by speaking out against the militant group’s ban on girls’ education in Pakistan. She was 15 years old in 2012, when a Taliban gunman shot her in the head and injured two of her classmates while they were riding a bus home from school.

Story continues

In a blog post published Wednesday, Yousafzai described meeting with 13-year-old Iraqi schoolgirl, Nayir, who’s experience fighting to get an education echoed her own:

When Nayir fled Mosul, she was determined to go back to school. “No matter what, nothing will keep me from finishing my studies,” she told me. Her new classroom is a small tent in the camp. She just took her exams in sweltering heat. But Nayir knows that education is her best chance for a better future. After all she has suffered, she described the feeling of returning to school: “It was as if all my hopes came back.” I know how Nayir feels.

Yousafzai’s visit wasn’t entirely somber, though. She also set some time aside to eat cake and play bumper cars with her new friends.

On my last night as a teenager, I bumped into my new friends in Iraq. 🚘 pic.twitter.com/4RfSBhoyUE — Malala (@Malala) July 12, 2017

Since the Taliban attack in 2012, Yousafzai has lived with her family in Birmingham, England. In between traveling the world to promote girls’ education and winning a Nobel Peace Prize, the young activist has been finishing up high school and has her sights set on Oxford University for the fall.

But many of the girls Yousafzai has worked to lift up won’t have these kinds of opportunities.

“If you look at how many people are suffering because of wars and conflicts, we have to open our hearts, we have to open our homes,” Yousafzai told TIME. “We have to support these people.”

Also on HuffPost

Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today.

And she's inspiring millions of others to do the same

In the weeks after she was shot, United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education, Gordon Brown, launched a petition in her name. The Malala Petition called for the U.N. to recommit to Millennium Development Goal 2, which aims to get every child in school by 2015. The petition eventually got more than 3 million signatures.



The petition reportedly prompted Pakistan to pass a Right to Education bill, which guarantees free education for all children.

Malala advocates for young women everywhere

“We must help girls fight all the obstacles in their lives, and stand up and speak bravely and overcome the fear they have in their hearts,” Malala said at a private dinner in August, per Forbes.



A month before, the young woman had met with Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan in Abuja, Nigeria, to advocate for the 219 schoolgirls kidnapped by terrorist group Boko Haram.



At the time, Malala addressed the girls’ captors: “Lay down your weapons. Release your sisters. Release my sisters. Release the daughters of this nation. Let them be free. They have committed no crime."

And her organization, Malala Fund, is changing the world

Malala said at this year's Clinton Global Initiative that her fund is pledging a $3 million multi-year commitment, in partnership with Echidna Giving, to support education initiatives in developing countries, according to ABC News.



Also this year, Malala and other team members from her fund helped hundreds of Syrian children refugees cross from their war-torn country into Jordan. Malala and her organization have been advocating for the more than 1 million displaced Syrian refugee children and helping them get access to education.



(In the photograph above, Malala is pictured chatting with a 16-year-old Syrian refugee during a visit to a refugee camp near the Syrian border, in Mafraq, Jordan, Tuesday, Feb. 18, 2014.)

She won’t let haters stand in her way

She has supporters worldwide, but Malala has also endured her fair share of criticism.



She has, for instance, been accused by some of abandoning her own people and becoming a Western mouthpiece. Responding to these accusations, she told the BBC last year: "My father says that education is neither Eastern or Western. Education is education: it's the right of everyone."

And her dreams are big and wonderful

Malala told CNN's Christiane Amanpour last year that she hopes to one day be the prime minister of Pakistan. "Through politics, I can serve my whole country," she said.



The youngster is a believer in big dreams. "The important thing is to always ask the world to do some things. But sometimes they cannot be done, so you have to take a stab and you have to do them,” she said in August.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost.