The Celebrity Charity Complex

The Foreign Policy blog recently gave charitable celebrity, Madonna, a chide or two for uprooting villagers in order to build her school in Malawi and I feel obligated to come to her defense. No one knows the real story, but what we do know is people love to complain about rich people who are trying to do good things. There is  that annoying portion of the population that refuses to believe that successful people can also be compassionate people and it seems a shame to me that celebrities like Bono, Angelina Jolie, and Madonna have to bear the same level of scrutiny over where they spend their money and how they spend their free time when they are helping fix the world’s problems as people like Lindsey Lohan and Britney Spears bear when they’re out getting drunk and showing off their panties.

If we’re going to start criticizing the paparazzi, this is where we should begin. Stirring rumors that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie use their humanitarian aid actions to drum up positive PR is a juvenile move that discourages others with money to make a difference. The majority of people criticizing those who are trying don’t have the first intimation of how difficult it is to run a non-profit or the vast complexity of problems in the Third World.

In the case of Madonna’s Malawi school for girls, approximately 200 villages have been asked to leave their homes which currently reside on government-owned land. The villagers are being paid approximately 16 million kwacha ($115,000) in compensation. Madonna’s Raising Malawi Foundation will also pay for improvements at their new homes such as providing gardens and fruit trees. Some of the villagers have complained about being forced to move and thus reporters have been latching onto the headlines like “Madonna kicks out villagers” when the reality is significantly less sensational. It was government land, the villagers are being compensated, and in the big picture – (we must always look at the big picture) – the villagers are being asked to move so that their daughters can potentially have the opportunity to attend the future school. As the director of the Raising Malawi Foundation, Philip Van Den Bosche put it, “It was a done deal of course, but whenever Madonna’s name is involved, opportunism is involved.”

Raising Malawi works to provide nutritious food, proper clothing, secure shelter, formal education, and targeted medical care to Malawi’s thousands of orphans.

• Organizatio n Type: Non-Profit
• Website: http://www.raisingmalawi.org/
• Founder(s): Madonna and Michael Berg
• Founded: 2006
• Location: Malawi, Africa
• See complete company list here