The Live Aid concert was a landmark televised event for the campaign to end hunger and brought a new consciousness to the world. This largest media event ever, reaching an estimated audience of 1.5 billion people around the world (40% of the world's population), provided a unique opportunity to educate massive numbers of people about ending hunger. 

Why Live Aid Still Matters

Live Aid remains one of the clearest demonstrations of what coordinated communications can achieve when hunger is framed as a shared human concern. For a brief priod, global attention aligned across media, culture, and geography, bringing the realities of hunger into living rooms around the world.

At the same time, Live Aid revealed an enduring challenge. Public awareness rose rapidly, but the structures needed to sustain understanding, accountability, and long-term engagement were limited. Attention peaked, then faded.

For the End Hunger Network, Live Aid was not simply an historic event. It was an early lesson in both the power of large-scale communications and the necessity of continuity if hunger is to remain a public priority.

Leading performers at Live Aid included: Queen, Sting, Phil Collins, Madonna, Elvis Costello, The Four Tops, BB King, Crosby Stills & Nash, Bob Dylan, U2, The Beach Boys, Ozzie Osbourne, David Bowie, Mick Jagger, The Pretenders, The Who, Elton John, George Michael, Tom Petty, Kenny Loggins, Eric Clapton, Led Zeppelin, Patti LaBelle, Hall & Oates, and Tina Turner.

The End Hunger Network was asked by Worldwide Sports and Entertainment, the producers of the U.S. portion of the concert, to write and produce all the educational and fundraising materials for this 16-hour global event. In addition, the End Hunger Network was responsible for writing the script used by performers and television hosts who anchored the concert.

Prior to the concert, the End Hunger Network featured actress Valerie Harper and Dr. Djibril Diallo of the United Nations Development Programme in a satellite teleconference, briefing over 500 global broadcasters who would be involved with the concert worldwide. This briefing provided the broadcasters with current data about hunger, especially in Africa, and coached them on how to talk about the issue. In addition, informational material was sent to all broadcasters in each of the 60 nations participating in the broadcast.

Live Aid as a Global Communications Experiment

Live Aid functioned as a global communications experiment at an unprecedented scale. Messaging was coordinated across continents, broadcast windows were synchronized, and cultural figures were mobilized to carry a shared narrative about hunger and responsibility.

The key issues of Live Aid were developed by the End Hunger Network in consultation with private voluntary organizations and integrated into all the communication messages during and around the concert:

• We can end the famine in Africa and hunger in the world.
• The task ahead is not only relief, but also recovery and self-reliance among the developing nations.
• Efforts to combat hunger are succeeding.
• Small individual efforts add up to the huge worldwide movement so that “your involvement matters.”

Special efforts were taken to ensure that messaging from the stage, press interviews, and during broadcasts focused on the dignity and courage of Africans experiencing famine, as well as challenging the rest of the world to step up in response.

The End Hunger Network’s mission was to communicate these messages in the three-minute spots allotted for every ½ hour in the 16-hour show, and to do it in such a way that all four messages could be delivered effectively every two hours (the average time it was estimated that individuals would watch the show. These spots within the broadcast featured world and U.S. leaders, including Bishop Desmond Tutu, former President Jimmy Carter, and Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi of India. Actress Sally Field and announcer Casey Kasem were featured in the EHN-produced fundraising spots that are credited with raising funds from the U.S. audience.

Twelve television satellites broadcast around the world (including the Soviet Union), and simultaneous telethons were held in some 30 nations, including Australia, Japan, West Germany and Canada.

The response to Live Aid was unprecedented, raising over $125 million ($450 million in 2026 dollars). According to figures released by the Live Aid Foundation in January 1986, 60% of the money raised has gone to long-term development programs (projects that will assist the hungry and impoverished people of Africa to work towards self-sufficiency), 20% had been provided for emergency relief services, and 20% for transport equipment and programs to move food to where it was most needed during the famine crisis.

In an era before the Internet, mobile phones, or social platforms, music and broadcast media were among the few tools capable of connecting people across borders in real time. The End Hunger Network worked within those constraints to help shift how hunger was presented, moving away from portrayals of pity and helplessness and toward dignity, shared responsibility, and the possibility of action.

The event demonstrated that when messaging is clear, consistent, and emotionally resonant, public engagement can be mobilized rapidly across borders. It also demonstrated that awareness alone is not self-sustaining. These lessons continue to inform the End Hunger Network’s work today: hunger is not solved by information alone, but neither can it be solved without sustained public understanding.

From Moments to Movements

Live Aid showed what is possible when hunger briefly becomes impossible to ignore. What it did not create was a permanent communications infrastructure capable of carrying that urgency forward year after year.

The End Hunger Network’s work today builds on that lesson. Our focus is not on recreating singular moments, but on supporting the communicators, storytellers, and messengers who help ensure hunger remains visible, understood, and unacceptable in public discourse.

The performance links that follow are included not simply as a record of the event, but as a reflection of what made Live Aid historically distinct. For the first time at this scale, people around the world shared the same experience at the same moment, connected through music, broadcast media, and a sense of shared purpose.

Live Aid represented a rare convergence of creative talent, media organizations, journalists, broadcasters, technicians, advertisers, and global partners working together toward a common goal. This cooperation made it possible to carry a positive message about hunger across borders in real time and to invite public participation in a way that had not been attempted before.

Importantly, the conversation extended beyond responding to an immediate famine. Live Aid helped open a broader dialogue about whether hunger itself could be addressed, and ultimately ended, through collective attention, responsibility, and action. That question, newly joined at the time, continues to shape how the End Hunger Network understands the role of communications in lasting change.