First published April 10, 2021.
In April 2021, the singer The Weeknd (Abel Tesfaye) gave $1 million to World Food Program USA, the American partner of the UN World Food Programme (WFP), to fund about two million meals for people going hungry in Ethiopia. The money was aimed at families caught up in the war in the northern Tigray region, where fighting had wrecked harvests, markets and supply routes. Below is what he pledged, why the cause was personal for him, what the crisis actually looked like, and what a "meals" figure can and cannot tell you about a donation.
What The Weeknd pledged, and to whom
The announcement came on 4 April 2021, in a post on his social media account. He opened with the line "My heart breaks for my people of Ethiopia," described civilians of every age being killed and whole villages fleeing, and said his $1 million would cover two million meals through the WFP. He also asked fans who were able to give to do the same.
WFP USA confirmed the gift the same day. It said the money would support emergency food relief for people affected by the conflict in Tigray, at a time when the agency was trying to scale up to reach as many as two million people over the following six months.
https://t.co/EBvWQ1TZlM pic.twitter.com/5y8z6HlY1e
— The Weeknd (@theweeknd) April 4, 2021
(This post is no longer available on X.)
The original post has since disappeared from X, but the pledge and its terms were recorded by the charity itself, which is the more reliable record anyway.
Why Ethiopia matters to him
Abel Makkonen Tesfaye was born in Ontario, Canada, in February 1990 to Ethiopian immigrants, Makkonen Tesfaye and Samrawit Hailu. His parents separated when he was very young, and he was raised in Scarborough, Toronto, largely by his mother and grandmother. He grew up speaking Amharic, Ethiopia's main working language, and has often pointed to that heritage in interviews and in his music.
The donation landed only two months after his headline set at the Super Bowl LV halftime show in February 2021, when his profile was at a peak. Later in 2021, the WFP named him one of its goodwill ambassadors, a role focused on drawing attention to hunger and food security. In other words, the Ethiopia gift was not a one-off gesture; it was the start of a longer public link with the agency.
The Tigray war and the hunger it caused
The war began in early November 2020. On the night of 3 November, forces loyal to the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), which governed the region, attacked federal army bases; the federal government launched an offensive the next day. Eritrean troops and regional forces from neighbouring Amhara fought alongside the federal side.
The timing could hardly have been worse for food supplies. Fighting broke out at the height of the harvest, so crops were lost, farm work stopped and markets closed. Prices rose while cash and fuel became hard to find. By early 2021, the Ethiopian government estimated that 4.5 million people needed emergency food aid, and WFP had been asked to support 1.4 million of them.
Access was the other big problem. The federal government tightly controlled entry into Tigray, and for long periods very little aid reached the people who needed it most. By summer 2022, about 13 million people across northern Ethiopia needed food assistance, and observers described famine conditions in parts of the region.
Human rights investigators later found that all sides committed serious abuses, including mass killings of civilians and widespread sexual violence. Death toll estimates vary enormously, from around 100,000 to as many as 600,000 people, many of them from hunger and lack of medical care rather than combat. A cessation of hostilities was signed in Pretoria on 2 November 2022.
A correction on independence
Some early coverage of the donation described the Tigrayans as fighting for their own independent state. That was not how the conflict started. In 2020 the TPLF's dispute with Addis Ababa was about national power: it called the federal government's postponed elections unconstitutional and declared the government illegitimate. Support for secession grew inside Tigray later, during the war, but it was not the original cause. Early displacement figures also need care: by December 2020 more than one million people had been driven from their homes, with tens of thousands more crossing into Sudan as refugees.
Echoes of the 1980s famine
For many readers, any mention of hunger in Ethiopia brings back the famine of 1983 to 1985. Estimates of the death toll range from about 300,000 to 1.2 million; historian Alex de Waal, who studied it closely, puts it at 400,000 to 500,000. Drought played a part, but so did civil war and the military government's policies, including counter-insurgency campaigns and forced resettlement. Human Rights Watch attributed more than half of the deaths to human rights abuses.
That famine reached Western television screens in 1984 and moved Bob Geldof to organise Band Aid, whose single "Do They Know It's Christmas?" raised £8 million within a year. The Live Aid concerts followed in July 1985. The parallel with Tigray is uncomfortable but real: in both cases, war and politics turned a food shortage into a catastrophe, and outside help depended on whether aid could physically get through.
What "two million meals" really means
Charities often convert a cash gift into meals because it makes the scale easy to picture. The figure is an estimate based on average costs, not a promise that exactly two million plates of food will reach Tigray. Real costs shift with transport, security, fuel prices and the type of food needed. Nutrition support for small children and pregnant or breastfeeding women, for example, costs more than basic grain rations.
At the time of the gift, WFP said it had already delivered maize, rice and vegetable oil to around 60,000 people in towns in eastern and southern Tigray, completed three rounds of monthly rations in two refugee camps it could reach, and begun nutrition programmes it hoped would reach 875,000 people. Those are the kinds of activities a donation like this pays for.
A few practical points if you want to give to a crisis like this yourself:
- Choose established agencies with operations already on the ground, such as UN bodies or large humanitarian groups. They can buy food locally or regionally and move it faster.
- Unrestricted cash is usually more useful than donated goods, which cost money to ship and may not match what people need.
- Look for delivery reports, not just appeals. Agencies such as WFP publish updates on how many people they reached and what access problems they faced.
His wider record of giving
The Ethiopia pledge fits a pattern. In 2020 he reportedly gave $300,000 to relief efforts after the Beirut port explosion in August that year. His longtime manager, Wassim "Sal" Slaiby, who co-founded the XO label with him, publicly thanked him at the time, calling him "my brother". Earlier reporting sometimes described Slaiby as his actual brother, but the two are not related; the word was a sign of their close working friendship. The singer was also reported to have given $500,000 to racial justice causes during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020.
Celebrity donations rarely change the course of a humanitarian emergency on their own; the needs in Tigray ran to hundreds of millions of dollars. What they can do is pull attention to a crisis that is otherwise easy to ignore, and encourage ordinary people to give too. In this case, a famous Ethiopian-Canadian singer naming the problem plainly, and asking fans to follow his lead, did exactly that.
Sources: World Food Program USA: The Weeknd donates 2 million meals to Ethiopia; Wikipedia: The Weeknd; Wikipedia: Tigray war; Wikipedia: 1983–1985 famine in Ethiopia; original report via Daily Mail.
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