Madonna charity denies Malawi dispute

The head of Madonna's Raising Malawi foundation has refuted claims of a land dispute over the singer's proposed school for girls.

According to The AP, Philip Van Den Bosche called assertions that the project is displacing villagers "erroneous" and that media reports are "not factual".

He also said that the leader of the village "made a very long speech about how grateful he was for this project" at a ceremony for the school.

Raising Malawi is building the girls school on a 117-acre plot of government land near the capital of Lilongwe. The area had been used by locals for farming when it was not utilised by the state, but Malawi reclaimed the land when the educational project emerged.

It worked out a deal in which 200 villagers would be paid 16 million kwacha (about $115,000) in total by Raising Malawi to compensate them for their houses.

"If you visited the land prior to this allocation, you would have found that there were at the most one or two small huts on the land," Van Den Bosche said.

"The people who were on the land now have an equivalent plot of agricultural land where they can continue their farming... The community will be enhanced by this."