London: Madonna has backed down from her promise to build a 15 million dollar school in Malawi after forcing villagers to give up their ancestral land to make way for the building.
Madonna, 52, had even attended a brick-laying ceremony at the Raising Malawi Girls Academy in Chinkhota, where the prestigious academy for underprivileged girls was to be constructed.
The singer has now said she would instead focus on building secondary schools across the country, rather than one school.
"I want to reach thousands, not hundreds of girls. I want to do more and I want to do it better," the Guardian quoted her as saying in a statement this month.
The Malawian government said it had not been consulted and will now summon her to explain herself.
"We'd like to know why she has changed," Peter Mutharika, the education minister, said.
"Yes, we do appreciate that it is her project; she devised it and she knows best how to implement it. But still, as government, we'd be interested to know why there is this change.
"I honestly don't know the number of schools she is going to construct, where she will build and for how long. So until we talk to her, we can't comment much," he stated.
