One of the two teams that represented the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in the 2020 World University Debate Championship has qualified from the preliminary stage to the quarterfinals stage of the competition.
The team, represented by reigning champions of the Pan African University Debate Championship, Boakye Nyamekye Isaac and Erasmus Segbefia broke in 6th position in the ‘English-as-a-Second-Language‘ (ESL) category with 16 points and 1,430 speaking points.
KNUST; who are participating in the ”Worlds’ for their first time after a successful 2019 Pan African Universities Debate Championship (PAUDC) host and win campaign is the only and first-ever team from Ghana and West Africa to achieve this feat.
Witwatersrand University from South Africa also joined KNUST in Africa to qualify in the same category on 8th position with 16 points and 1,411 speaking points, making them the only two universities from Africa to make it to the knockout stage of the competition.
The 4oth edition of the World University Debate Championship; the largest debate competition in the world which was first held in Glasgow in 1981 is being hosted at Assumption University in Thailand from December 27, 2019, to January 4, 2020. 353 teams from over 200 universities across the world are competing in this year’s WUDC.
After 9 preliminary rounds of intense debate, 72 teams have broken to the knockout stage of the tournament.
Format
The tournament lasts for a week, and it is filled with the best level of debate rounds in the world. The debates employ the British Parliamentary (BP) format in which four teams compete against each other on two opposite positions on a given motion, which is announced fifteen minutes before every debate.
The competition is run in nine rounds under a Swiss-system where teams of a similar level face off against each other until the best forty-eight break to the direct elimination rounds.
The best English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) and English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) teams enter their own elimination rounds.
