About Debate Society Uganda (DSU)
Institutional Capacity Building and Engagement
We are a non-profit, member based and duly registered organization in Uganda with the goal of helping youth find their voices on critical world issues affecting them and their communities. We work with partners to achieve our vision of an informed and engaged community with values of tolerance, patriotism, integrity and mutual respect.
What's our focus ?
Our work targets the student community in formal education as a core target group to influence and extend influence youth in communities as specific interest targets.
We therefore work with schools, university colleges and tertiary institutions among other formal education environments.
More About Our Work
Debate Society Uganda has done numerous works around Debate over the last 5 years of our existence as an organization in debate organization, training and adjudication.
We deliver with finesse on internationally recognized formats of debate for competitions, dialogue and research. Some of the formats of debate we have mastery over include;
For High Schools
The World Schools Debate Format
For universities
The British Parliamentary Format
The Lincoln-Douglas format for leadership debates
The Oxford Union Format
Debate Society Uganda has two program areas of:
Institutional Capacity building and engagement
Community Accountability.
Program Area 1:
Institutional Capacity Building and Engagement
In this program area we target high schools, universities and all organized learning environments through tailored debate activities suitable for their respective institutional environments.
For the schools target group,
DSU has two major engagement activities each year;
1. The Uganda Schools Debate Championship (USDC)
USDC is a nationwide high schools debate and public speaking program where DSU organizes regional competitions that culminate into a national competition of top performing 40 schools from the regions.
Participation in 2019 reached 100 schools with total direct student participation reaching over 1,000 students.
The program is currently run on a cost-sharing basis between schools and DSU members who contribute at will and from sourced partnerships and sponsorships.
Total Participants
count+
Students
in 2019
USDC has the objectives of;
Intra-school capacity building through support to school debate clubs
Providing a foundation for stakeholder learning influence through topics chosen
Providing a preliminary active citizenry-learning platform.
100
Schools Reached
The main goal with USDC
Value inculcation and nurture of an active citizenry in young people as they go through school
1000+ Particpants
100 Schools
Cost Sharing Basis
DSU runs a TV debate series for urban schools with a leading local TV station.
This activity includes media production of inter-school debates that air on TV to provide an amplification of student voices and inspire other students to speak up about different issues through debate. The activity was however paused in 2020 due to the restrictions of the COVID 19 pandemic and an implementation modality agreed for 2021 to focus on intra-school debating.
For the Universities target group
DSU runs the East African Universities Debate Championship with sister organizations in the Republics of Kenya, Rwanda and Tanzania.
DSU also runs tailored or thematic support debates for targeted debating with different Organizations and entities that have included SEATINI Uganda, ACFODE, Ministry of Finance, KCCA, Konrad Adeneur Stifftung (KAS) and the Uganda Law Society.
At the University level, the intended output is active and meaningful participation of participants in national, social, economic and political leadership/influence.
Program Area 2:
Community Accountability
Through DSU work in debate, we realized the need to meet growing engagement interests from citizens in our spaces. As such, DSU leverages the tools available in the 21st century to hold different ideas around community debate. However, with time, community debating required better indices for measuring accountability and impact, this informed the DSU community accountability programming.
To date, this has taken the form of holding leadership debates either for guild candidates or student communities in open halls of Universities and online chats. DSU has developed this program to encompass the following activities as new dimensions of the program area. The program area targets elected youth leaders.
Progress debates that provide accountability platforms for National Youth Leadership annually with Youth Mps, the National Youth Council and Youth CSO actors as the major stakeholders.
Enhancing the capacity of elected youth Leaders to engage and influence policy and youth programs. This is through public debating training, community engagement activities to help youth leaders understand the basic skills of policy analysis and advocacy through debating capacity enhancement.
The Online community engagements using social media to discuss various issues from time to time through scheduled tweet chats online productions.
Our Pictorial legacy report
Here is what we have done before;
Our Structure and Team
DSU works with the structure as follows
Our oversight board is composed of people that have demonstrable history of contributing to debate development and have used early debate development to achieve different strides in their lives. The board includes representation from government, private sector, civil society, educational institutions and DSU membership.
The secretariat is the executing arm of the society and is headed by the National Head, who is assisted by the Chief Financial Officer, Programs Coordinator and the communications coordinator. The society’s legal advisor advises these from time to time.
We have a total membership of just over 70 members in the categories of student members, general members and corporate members. We are opening up for affiliate institutions soon. Visit our membership hall to see all our membership.
More about our members
Our faculty members are individuals that attribute great career progress to their early engagements with debate at school and university levels and contribute to our programming through being technical advisors on programming and debate brand ambassadors on their large social spaces.
Learn MoreOur Partners
DSU has worked with many partners including the Parliament of Uganda, CEPA, Uganda Olympic Committee, Uganda Law Society, the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, Action for Development, SEATINI Uganda, NBS, KCCA, Ministry of Finance, Planning and Economic Development of Uganda, National Youth Council, ALP Advocates, Uganda Police, The Rose Namayanja Foundation, Open Space Uganda, action aid Uganda, East African Youth Ambassadors Platform etc.