By the Spoken Arts and Debate Society

From September 1 to 3, USIU Africa’s SADS attended the prestigious EAUDC which was hosted in the land of a thousand hills, Rwanda. The university hosting the tournament was the esteemed Rwandan Independent University, while the well-respected Aspire Debate Rwanda–a non-profit organization dedicated to enriching the Rwandan youth with the power of public speaking– was the main organizer of the tournament.

As the name of the tournament indicates, EAUDC brought together the best debaters in the East African region to participate in a three-day-long tournament to reach the finals and claim the title of the EAUDC 2023 champions. The tournament primarily utilized the British Parliamentary style of debate, the most common and highly regarded format for university debate.

USIU-Africa was represented in the EAUDC tournament by Wanjiru Karugu and Joshua Wambugu, two talented debaters in SADS who were the recent champions of the Ikenga Debate Tournament. After enduring the extensive preliminary rounds of the tournament, the two debaters qualified for finals after being the best team post-preliminaries.

USIU-Africa emerged as first-runners-up for this tournament, showing the debaters Wanjiru and Joshua’s exceptional skill in debate. Moreover, Joshua and Wanjiru would tie as second-best speakers of the tournament and Wanjiru would be awarded as the best female speaker. The champions of the EAUDC tournament was the African Leadership University while the second runners-up were Strathmore University.

The EAUDC has continued to show its capability to the platform and encourage debaters in the East African space to continue homing in on their debating and public speaking skills. Thus, we believe that our debaters were able to gain valuable skills in oration and critical thinking skills that they can utilize not only in their future tournaments but for their future academic and professional endeavors. Furthermore, with USIU-Africa once again showing its prowess in the public speaking and debate space, we believe that the SADS will continue to show the academic excellence of our prestigious institution.