Madonna Founded Organization, Raising Malawi, Collapses Due to Mismanagement

Building plans on Madonna's Raising Malawi Academy for Girls -- a charitable secondary school formatted to give education opportunities to young Malawi girls -- have come to a screeching halt, thanks to some mismanagement behind the scenes.

The original Raising Malawi board of directors has recently been replaced by a caretaker group, which includes Madonna and her manager, according to a statement released Thursday. "A thoughtful decision has been made to discontinue plans for the Raising Malawi Academy for Girls, as it was originally conceived," Michael Berg, co-director of the Los Angeles Kabbalah Centre and co-founder of Raising Malawi, said in an email to contributing members.

$3.8 million had already been put into the $15 million school-to-be, and $18 million had been raised to date -- including $11 million of Madonna's personal money. The 'Like a Prayer' singer said Thursday that she still gives the green light to helping to improve Malawi in any way that she can. "There’s a real education crisis in Malawi," Madonna says in a statement provided to the New York Times. "Sixty-seven percent of girls don’t go to secondary school, and this is simply unacceptable. Our team is going to work hard to address this in every way we can."

Global Philanthropy Group founder Trevor Neilson, who Madonna hired to help with the project last November, gave a more simplified account of the reason that the school is no longer being built. "Despite $3.8 million having been spent by the previous management team, the project has not broken ground, there was no title to the land and there was, over all, a startling lack of accountability on the part of the management team in Malawi and the management team in the United States," he says. "We have yet to determine exactly what happened to all of that $3.8 million. We have not accounted for all the funds that were used."

Madonna has not given further commentary since the initial announcement, as she is currently working on her upcoming film, 'W.E.'