Madonna broke ground for a multimillion-dollar girls’ school that she is building in Chinkhota village, outside the Malawi capital of Lilongwe.

The pop star also attended a brick-laying ceremony for the school, which is expected to cost about $15million (£9million), and promised to build schools in other countries if the project succeeds.

The Raising Malawi Academy for Girls will admit 500 pupils from across the country. Madonna said: “Growing up in a privileged life, I took education for granted . . . but coming to Malawi has taught me a lot of things.

“I realised how much [children] deserve to be educated and so, for me, the best thing I could do was to build a school, a unique school that will create future female leaders, scientists, lawyers, doctors and if this school is successful it will be used as a model to replicate it in other countries.”

An AIDS epidemic has left over a million children orphaned in Malawi, an impoverished country of 13 million people. The singer has adopted two children from the southern African nation.

Malawi’s Government came under fire after Madonna adopted a 13-month-old boy, David Banda, in 2006, with critics accusing it of giving her special treatment by skirting laws that ban non-residents from adopting children.

In June Malawi’s Supreme Court overturned a lower court ruling that said that Madonna could not adopt a four-year-old girl, Chifundo “Mercy” James, because the singer was not a resident of the country.

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