Beyoncé Pledges $1 Million to Colombia Earthquake Relief in Chocó
Beyoncé has announced a personal donation of $1 million to support earthquake relief in Colombia's Chocó region, where a 7.4-magnitude quake on August 10 killed at least 312 people and destroyed 29,000 homes. The donation, announced through a press release from her company Parkwood Entertainment and distributed via PR Newswire, is earmarked for food and housing supplies in the hardest-hit areas (Rolling Stone).
The scale of the disaster is still being measured. Colombia's central government confirmed the death toll and structural damage, as reported by The Associated Press. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates that roughly 10 percent of Chocó's population — about 69,000 people — were affected or displaced by the earthquake (Rolling Stone).
Chocó is a coastal department on Colombia's Pacific side, a region with deep Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities and some of the country's lowest infrastructure investment. A 7.4-magnitude quake is classified by seismologists as capable of widespread, heavy damage, particularly in areas where building codes are unevenly enforced.
Beyoncé is not the only major artist to step forward. Shakira, born in Barranquilla, Colombia, committed $1.25 million to rebuild 10 schools and a university in the affected region. Her pledge is being channelled through Fundación Pies Descalzos, the charitable foundation she established in 1997. The funds are drawn from multiple partners: $500,000 from Shakira and her touring partner Live Nation, $500,000 from the FIFA Global Citizen Education Fund, and $250,000 from CAF, the development bank of Latin America and the Caribbean (Rolling Stone).
Taken together, the two donations approach $2.25 million in pledged relief from recording artists alone. Beyoncé's contribution is directed at immediate survival needs — food and shelter — while Shakira's targets the longer arc of rebuilding educational infrastructure. Both are personal commitments routed through established entities rather than one-off fundraising campaigns.
For a region where the UN counts tens of thousands displaced, $2.25 million is meaningful but not sufficient, and neither artist has framed it as a solution. The announcements land amid a broader humanitarian response still taking shape, with Colombian authorities and international agencies coordinating on the ground. What the artist-led pledges do is direct attention, alongside money, toward a region that often sits far from international headlines.
