Pop queen Shakira back to her roots

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Shakira taking education to Colombia's poorest children

In the face of a decades-long insurgency, the international singing star Shakira has been back to her roots in Colombia to help disadvantaged children get the education they deserve. The BBC's Rajesh Mirchandani went with her.

To travel with multi-million-selling pop star Shakira is to travel behind tinted windows, on private planes and on Shakira time - always at least an hour behind schedule and always stopping for autographs and photos. It involves long waits while she has hair and make-up touch-ups before emerging from cars, planes and buildings.

But at the centre of the superstar entourage is a young Colombian who is disarmingly friendly and passionately eloquent about education.

And education was the reason we travelled with Shakira to the north-west border province of Choco, deep in the Colombian jungle. It is remote and poor.

Education provides a lifeline to children caught up in civil conflict

And it's an area devastated by the civil conflict that has ravaged the country for nearly half a century, forcing three million Colombians to flee their homes.

We were heading to a school Shakira has funded.

She told me: "One-hundred per cent of our kids that we have in our school here have been displaced or have families that have fled their home towns."

Shakira has been here several times and the reaction is always the same: frenzied rapture. She is surrounded by exuberant children as she makes her way down dirty, pot-holed streets, past wooden shacks and open sewers.

But the welcome she gets is not just because she's a famous pop star. In an area of grinding poverty she provides a lifeline.

'Abandoned people'

Battling through the crowd she leads me to the best-kept building in the entire village: the school funded by her charity Fondacion Pies Descalzos (Bare Feet Foundation, named after her first hit album).

Villagers in Chaco send their own message to their benefactor

In a white-washed classroom, children in neat uniforms sing along with the popstar. Some of these children are orphans, most are traumatised by years of fighting.

Shakira's foundation provides uniforms, equipment and food for 750 pupils. It's their only daily guarantee of a meal.

I ask a teacher why the government doesn't provide such things. "You'll have to ask the president that," she says. "He should pay more attention to the plight of the people of Choco. We've been abandoned."

But, thanks to Shakira, Colombia's government seems to be taking notice.

Hundreds of miles away in Barranquilla, the singer's hometown, a ceremony is taking place to inaugurate another school she has built (she used $4m of her own money and coaxed