New York: Pakistani teenager and Nobel peace award winner Malala Yousafzai told Nigerian schoolgirls, who were kidnapped a year ago by Boko Haram militants that they will never be forgotten and to never lose hope.
 "Please know this, we will never forget you. We will always stand with you," 17-year-old Yousafzai wrote in an open letter to the missing girls. "We will not rest until you have been reunited with your families."
In her letter, Yousafzai called on Nigerian authorities and the international community "to do more," to free the more than 200 schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram militants a year ago. "In my opinion, Nigerian leaders and the international community have not done enough to help you," wrote Yousafzai.
"Your parents are grief-stricken. They love you, and they miss you," she wrote to the missing girls. However, she said there were reasons to be optimistic about rescuing the girls and encouraged them to "never lose hope."
To mark the anniversary of the kidnapping, The Malala Fund, the charitable organization founded by Yousafzai and her father Ziauddin to empower girls through education, launched the #DearSisters initiative to gather messages of hope and support for the abducted girls.
Their abduction from a secondary school in Chibok in the country's Northeast last April, drew international attention to the humanitarian crisis caused by the militants, to establish a medieval-style caliphate in religiously mixed Nigeria. While some of the girls managed to escape the militants' grip, the majority of them remains missing.