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Bob Geldof set up Band Aid after being moved by television footage of the 1984 famine in Ethiopia. He won the Beacon Prize for Leadership for his work in raising millions though Band Aid and Live Aid, for his campaigns to cancel Third World debt and to improve responses to poverty and famine, as well as for his advocacy for the rights of divorced fathers.
Four mentions in the telegraph in the last couple of days.....
The chief executives of the British Red Cross, the Disasters Emergency Committee and the Charities Aid Foundation were speaking at an event in London to announce the winners of the Beacon Prizes for contributions to charitable and social causes. Its winners this year include Bob Geldof, Jamie Oliver and Sigrid Rausing.
Africa is short of everything except good intentions, platitudes and promises of money from Western taxpayers. Yet it will be showered with all three today when Tony Blair's Commission for Africa unveils its report on the world's poorest continent.
Thanks to advance leaks of the contents of this 400-page tome, we know exactly what the 17 international luminaries, ranging from the Prime Minister to Bob Geldof, who sit on this august body think is needed for a "strong and prosperous Africa".
Bob Geldof told a vintage Benson story from the occasion when, in the 1980s, he took a party of journalists to Ethiopia to witness the Live Aid famine relief efforts. At one stage during the tour, Benson went missing from the DC9 in which they were about to travel and was later found standing behind the plane's propeller drying his hair. Benson denied the story: "What actually happened was that we were on a plane and I said to Geldof: 'One of the problems with Ethiopia is that there are no hair-driers'. He replied: 'You can dry your f****** hair under a f****** propeller'. It was a merry jest between old mates."