The first time Bob Geldof saw Birhan Woldu was on television. It was 1984 and the face of the child was one of the most haunting images in the BBC report that alerted the world to the famine in Ethiopia.

At the end of a harrowing sequence of images of malnourished children, the camera stopped on a child whose eyes were closed by pain and whose parched lips were swollen with dehydration. The nurses said she would be dead within minutes. Her name was Birhan Woldu.

The film shocked the world. It prompted Geldof to summon the dozens of pop stars together under the logo Band Aid to make a fundraising record, 'Do They Know It's Christmas?'. Today is the 25th anniversary of its release. To mark it, Geldof returned to Ethiopia to see how the money has been spent. At one of the projects Band Aid has funded, a young woman was waiting to meet him. It was Woldu.

The 26-year-old was standing at the end of the drive at Hagere Selam school in the northern province of Tigray. The child had grown into a poised young woman. She stood with her hair plaited in corn-rows across the crown of her head, dressed in a plain white robe, embroidered with black, green and red panels. She had the bearing of a princess. Behind her, the new school building is home to 500 pupils aged between seven and 15. It is one of four schools run in Ethiopia by a charity named
A-CET, funded by Band Aid.

The Irish rock star was received like royalty by hundreds of cheering pupils and their parents. He was presented with a bouquet of yellow silk roses and asked to cut a ribbon across the driveway and then unveil a plaque of dedication to the school whose graduates include an accountant, mechanical engineer, information systems analyst and an international lawyer. But the wildest welcome came fromWoldu, who threw her arms around him and buried her face in his chest.

Woldu has spent the past three years training to be a nurse. "I had a vision," she told Geldof. "I was saved by the skill of a nurse, and now it is my turn to save someone."

Following the BBC report in 1984, not long after the camera had moved from her face the little girl's eyelids had stopped flickering. But as her father wrapped her in a shroud, he sensed a tiny pulse. He called a nurse who administered some rehydration shots. After three days the child began to blink. A week later she could walk.

Now, she told Geldof, she had just finished her training and was working as a volunteer at the
A-CET school until she finds a nursing post. But she was not the only nurse present. One of the trustees of A-CET is Claire Bertschinger, the nurse who had shocked BBC reporter Michael Buerk in his 1984 report from the Ethiopian famine plains when she said she was moving through the crowds of malnourished children deciding who should live and who should die. Those she thought she could help, she admitted; those she deemed too ill she sent away to die.

"Twenty five years on and it is so great to be back in Mekele and to find that everything is so much improved, said Bertschinger, who is now director of tropical nursing at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. "The place is thriving. There are good roads, new factories, a busy university and local people in the restaurants. There have been two years of consecutive droughts but the famine early-warning systems are now working well." Last month, the government appealed for 159,000 tonnes of food aid worth €80m to feed 6.2 million people until the year's end.

"But people look healthy, children are well, livestock look good," she said. "Deaths among under-fives ha­s been halved in Tigray and it is one of the few places on course to meet the Millennium Development Goal to halve child mortality by 2015. There are certain food shortages that need addressing but overall I'm very positive."

A-CET's manager Bisrat Mesfin, who was a graduate of the school which rescued him from a life selling chewing gum on the streets, thanked Geldof and the two other Band Aid trustees accompanying him on the trip: "With your money we built this school. With education we can do anything."

Geldof thanked him in return. "Twenty-five years ago we told the world about your pain," he said. "Now we want to tell the world about your wonderful children, this fantastic school and the healthy flourishing community you have become."

The school band closed with an idiosyncratic rendition of the Band Aid single. "Better than the real thing," the singer said. A quarter of a century on, they could do it for themselves.