The debate was organized in rounds. Winning teams at given round progressed to the next round while losing teams were automatically out of the competition. In the following sections, games, teams and winners if each game are presented.

1. Round One

The first round of this competition included seventeen teams organized in three groups. The teams did a draw to know which group to belong to. Groups one and two consisted of six teams each and there were three games in each group. These three games led to three winning teams that progressed to the second round. Group 3 had 5 teams which played a face off and knock out games to know the two winners to go to the next round.

Table 1. Games in Group I

Table 2. Games in Group II

Games in group three did not lead to the qualification straight away because of the number of teams in the group. Therefore, two games were organized which determined two winners. In addition to that, a ‘best loser’ was determined from those two games based on their average score from judges. The two winners and the best loser were paired with one team that had not played so far and the two winners made it to the next round.

Face-off games for group III

These games were aimed at determined which teams would be able to compete for a place in the next round. At this stage, a best loser was selected to have four teams in the knock-out phase of this round one in group three.

Table 3. Face-off games for group III

Knock-out Games for Group III

At this stage, two winning teams were needed to join the six others that had won the games in group 1 and 2. Winning teams here progressed to the second round.

Table 4. Knock-out games for Group Three

2. Round Two (Quarter Finals)

After the first round, teams had to make a draw to determine their competitor for the next round. The table below shows the different games between teams in the second round and the winners of those games. At this stage, two rooms were used for the debates. In each room, there were three judges.

3. Round Three (Semi-finals)

Four teams made it to this round. These were the winning teams from round three. These teams also got to draw which team they would face and whether they would be proposing or opposing a notion that was decided by the judges. The results of the draw led to the games presented in the table below.

4. Fourth Round (FINAL)

The final round brought together Groupe Scholaire Notre Dame de Lourde, Byimana and FAWE Girls School Gisozi, two teams that had emerged from the previous rounds as the best. This was the final stage of the competition. Three judges observed the debate and graded teams’ performance using a pre-defined rubric that had also been used in previous rounds. The three judges then added up their individually awarded grades to each team and added up to make an average which determined the winner of the debate. Like all the previous games, rules remained unchanged and the duration of the debate was not changed, i.e the first speaker were given five minutes while the 2nd and the third speaker would get three minutes.

The final debate was won by FAWE Girls School Gisozi on unanimous vote of all the three judges. This team was hence declared the winner of the FAWE/Master Card Foundation Scholars Program Debate Completion 2016.

5. Best Debater

At every game, judges were requested to vote for the best debater of the game based on individual performances of each debater. A nominee with the biggest number of votes from the judges would be declared the best debater of the game. Records of this were kept till the last game. At the end of the debate debaters were ranked based on the number of times they had been declared best debaters at each game. This list was used to select the best and second best debaters of the competition. The following were the two best debaters of the FAWE/MasterCard Debate Competition

 Niyigena Flora, FAWE Gisozi (1st best)
 Murungi Benitha Sandrine, G.S.N.L. Byimana (2nd Best)
 Kato David, Lycee de Kigali (3rd Best)

Part II. Essay Writing Competition

The second component of the competition was an essay writing competition. Every school was represented by one candidate on the essay writing competition. In total, seventeen (17) students participated in the essay writing competition. The essays were marked separately by three judges. The results were then added up and the candidate with highest average was declared the winner of the competition.
Below are the three winners of the Essay writing competition`