Madonna’s charity builds ten schools in Malawi

Melbourne: Madonna has built 10 primary schools in Malawi during 2012, her charity has announced. Two years after abandoning a 15-million-dollar girls’ academy, the 54-year-old singer said on Friday that the projects in 2012 will help educate 4871 children in the tiny southern African country, News.com.au reported. The projects were carried out by the pop diva’s charity Raising Malawi and the global non-profit buildOn. In a statement released by her charity, the ‘Like A Virgin’ hit-maker said that she was overjoyed that her commitment along with buildOn’s to help educate the children of Malawi had come to fruition. She said that in a country where girls have little opportunity for education, it’s additionally inspiring to know that more than half the students attending are going to be young girls. The schools, which had been scheduled to be constructed over 18 months, were completed six months ahead of schedule. The charity said that six of the schools are already in use and all 10 would be up and running in January 2013 for the first day of school in the New Year. Two years back, Madonna had controversially stopped the construction of the state-of-the-art 15-million-dollar Raising Malawi Academy for Girls (RMAG) in Chinkhota village, 15 kilometres from the administrative capital Lilongwe, after it was mired in allegations of financial mismanagement. The academy, styled on the lines of the one built by TV host Oprah Winfrey in South Africa, was meant to offer 500 scholarships to girls from poor backgrounds and groom them into future leaders. In abandoning the project, Madonna said that the academy would not have been adequate as two-thirds of the girls were not educated beyond primary school. Instead, she said that she had wanted to reach thousands and not hundreds of girls by constructing several schools. ANI