Young people all over the world are central to change. Meet Riana, 26, from Madagascar. She combines her French with IT to offer professional webmaster services..
She has been involved in Blue Cross Madagascar for years. But really got involved in alcohol policy work in 2013 when working on the monitoring of alcohol marketing in Madagascar in partnership with EUCAM.
Riana has a vision of bringing young people together to tackle the negative drinking culture in our region to prevent it from continuing to destroy communities.
What was the best part of GAPC 2015 for you?
For me, having the opportunity to attend GAPC Conference was a whole great experience. I particularly learned a lot from presentation by Maristela Monteiro from Brazil where she exposed major issues of alcohol marketing regulation in her country. In Brazil, alcohol producers directly finance athletes and sports events at university, they offer sponsorship for students to drink massive amount of alcohol for derisory price to encourage them to always consume more alcohol beverages of all sorts. Brazil is quite big and wealthy country, but I realized that the issues of artisanal home-brewed and illegal alcohol is common to our case in under-developed Madagascar. The easy availability and attractive price make illegal alcohol the ideal alternative alcoholic beverage during parties where young people have tendency to drink a lot regardless of the quality of what they ingest. One can easily guess the disastrous consequences of such behavior: fight, violence, car crash, alcoholic coma, unsafe sex, death.
What were your key learnings?
The fact that global alcohol industry isn’t regulated by international conventions unlike tobacco industry is a major issue and challenge for all organizations working in various fields against harmful use of alcohol around the world. It is also necessary to establish legislation and enforce existing regulations to limit or ban alcohol marketing especially those targeted to young people and children, both in national and international level. In order to achieve effective alcohol policy implementation, each country has to conduct research to monitor and evaluate the pattern of alcohol consumption, its various effects and seize the impact of regulations and taxes on reducing alcohol related harm. Research are compulsory to evaluate what can be done in creation and/or enforcement of policy, laws and regulations on alcohol industry.
What will you do differently now in Madagascar
In Madagascar, we definitely need to assess the current situation of drinking behaviors and analyze the effect of alcohol market on corresponding community problems (health problem, violence, development issues, etc.). The main purpose of such research is to turn evidence into action towards the implementation of effective evidence-based national alcohol policy.
How can we mobilize youth in Southern Africa?
Africa is a young continent who is regretfully considered as a new source of massive income for the alcohol industry, not only due to the lack of effective regulations on alcohol sales but also to the globalizations that make young people more and more attracted by heavy drinking which is considered as modern and associated to Western lifestyle. In Africa, we need to have an organization that leads the way to inform and educate public on real danger of alcohol through large marketing campaign based on real updated data’s and relevant information (for example how many people dies every year/every day in car accident due to alcohol abuse, how violence due to irresponsible drinking can cause irreversible consequences, etc.).
It would also be interesting to introduce community organization of young people which aims to promote alcohol free way of life: how can we have fun without alcohol, how to make friends without being drunk, how cool attitude can be compatible with sobriety.
What are the alcohol policies in Madagascar and Southern Africa that can make a difference in the lives of young people? And, how can we get those policies?
Because young people usually learn from their peers, alcohol policies that aims to reduce the impact of social marketing on alcohol consumption seems to me an absolutely hard requirement.
To get such regulation, both government and civil society need to commit in multi sectoral collaboration to achieve concrete alcohol strategy for the development and implementation of evidence-based alcohol legislation. One lessons we can learn from is the French Evin Law, considered as the role model for alcohol marketing regulation.