Community members' perspectives of two interactive events aimed at interrupting underage drinking: a rapid assessment

Abstract

In response to the problem of underage drinking, the Association for Alcohol Responsibility and Education (AwARE.org) piloted an early intervention programme that aimed to prevent and interrupt underage drinking amongst school-going youth in two provinces in South Africa. This intervention programme, called 'It starts today', targeted school-going youth residing in two communities in the Free State and Mpumalanga. As part of this programme, AwARE.org launched a community-based campaign comprising 'one-day' events held at taxi ranks and malls (respectively) located in popular areas within the targeted communities in both provinces. The current report focuses only on the community campaigns and readers are referred to previous evaluation reports (Groenewald et al. (2018a; 2018b) on the AwARE.org website (https://aware.org.za/) for additional information regarding the full 'It starts today' programme. Names of the communities and spaces of implementation (including malls and taxi ranks) have been anonymised in this report in order to protect community identities and avoid possible stigmatisation of these communities.