Live Aid's legacy lives on

2005-06-28 09:49

London - As the world eagerly anticipates this weekend's Live 8 concerts, the impact of the original Live Aid charity event nearly 20 years ago is still being felt across Africa, according to experts.

The star-studded 1985 concert, organised by singer-turned-activist Bob Geldof, raised a small fortune to feed people hit by a famine in Ethiopia.

Two decades on, the legacy of that momentous event is still reverberating across Africa in real terms, and through the developed world in spirit.

Geldof wants to complete the journey with Live 8, a multi-city series of similar gigs on Saturday, aimed not at fund-raising but pressuring the world's most powerful leaders into lasting action on African poverty.

Staring death in the face

"Live Aid was a massive charitable response to the fact that millions of people faced imminent death," said Oliver Buston, European director of Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa (Data), the Africa campaign group of U2 singer and activist Bono.

In simultaneous gigs in London and Philadelphia on July 13 1985, the 16-hour "global jukebox" reached some 95% of television sets worldwide, raising an estimated $275m in current values.

The previous year, a shocking BBC television report showing the desperate plight of famine-stricken, skeletal Ethiopians dying in camps horrified viewers worldwide.

Geldof, appalled, asked what he could do.

The musician masterminded the Band Aid charity record Do They Know It's Christmas?, roping in a who's who of pop musicians to raise cash and awareness.

The multi-million-selling single spurred Geldof into organising Live Aid, a massive concert intended to do the same on an even bigger scale.

Leaving a legacy

The concert's legacy is still very tangible in Ethiopia through a famine early warning system and aid distribution mechanism, said Paul Hetherington, from British charity Save the Children.

In 1984, no food distribution mechanism existed in the country. Now a series of warehouses are dotted nationwide and most of the 150 trucks purchased with Live Aid money are still transporting food across Ethiopia.

Hetherington said the donations surge sparked by Live Aid allowed charities to expand and forced them to become more professional and accountable.

Raising awareness of the poverty problem

Live Aid's biggest impact in the developed world was to rocket African poverty into the public and political consciousness.

Approaching the July summit of G8 leaders' in Scotland, today's politicians are all too aware of the problem.

The time has finally come to address the fundamental problems that Band Aid did, and could, not, experts say.

"What is still lacking and what Live Aid didn't do was generate the need for development monies to go in. Ethiopia is the lowest recipient of development aid in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa."

"Live 8 is about moving on from the Live Aid story of charity to the question of political justice," Buston added.

- AFP