Aadielah Maker Diedericks has a Masters in Community Health from UNSW, Sydney; is a public health advocate with experience in developing and producing edutainment and multi-media interventions, training, social mobilisation and campaign management. She has worked in the civil society sector for over 25 years in the areas of sexual and reproductive health, HIV and AIDS, gender and alcohol. She managed the award winning Soul Buddyz programme and Soul City Phuza Wise campaign. Currently, she is coordinating the Southern African Alcohol Policy Alliance. SAAPA is a platform for civil society organisations across 8 countries – Botswana, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe - lobbying for health promoting evidence based alcohol policies. At regional level, SAAPA focus on promoting alcohol as a development issue impacting across sectors. A key strategy is to lobby the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to include alcohol in its agenda in order to influence governments within the region. Through SAAPA’s efforts Malawi (2017) and Zambia (2018) has adopted National Alcohol Policies. In 2017 SAAPA in South Africa successfully mobilised civil society to stop SAB’s “Beers for Africa” marketing campaign. The focus in 2018 in South Africa is to mobilise government to release the Control of Marketing of Alcoholic Beverages Bill of 2013, which has not been released to the public for comment for 5 years. To this end, SAAPA has initiated an “END ALCOHOL AVDERTISING SPORT” campaign, similar to a campaign in Australia. SAAPA also successfully made a submission to the UN Commission on Cultural, Social and Economic Rights on the right to participation and consultation in the absence of the South African government making available the Control Bill to the public for comment.