Scatec Youth Debate Club

Scatec Youth Debate Club is an educational project made to teach children the intellectual game of debate. These are intellectual competitions in which participants practice their ability to argue their position on various issues. This is the first educational project for all our communities in Ukraine (across five Project sites).

The challenge

The project is aimed at the intellectual development of active youth, improving their communication skills, strengthening their self-confidence, and gaining experience in public speaking. By participating in training and competitions, participants will learn to communicate, argue and defend their opinions. Scatec Youth Debate Club also aims to introduce teenagers to peers from other communities to exchange ideas and network. Because the communities are different and, accordingly, teenagers face both different and similar challenges, it is valuable to meet peers from other communities and see how young people can influence the life of the community. It was the first opportunity to travel outside the region for many teenagers.

How we worked together

It was a challenging project to gather teenagers from different communities and encourage them to develop their skills. In some communities, we found responsible adults who managed to organize training, and accordingly these teams showed good results in all competitions. However, motivated teenagers even without a local team joined online games and showed a good level of skill development. Both the coaches and the teenagers say that all the participants improved their communication and argumentation skills. Teenagers from different communities got to know each other and actively communicate outside of the project.

This is an important youth educational project that helps teenagers acquire communication and leadership skills.
– Tetyana Chepurnenko, Team coach

Key results

Participating in the debate club has given me the ability to build sentences better during speaking, confidence in public speaking, made my thinking flexible and helped me understand how to look at things and perceive them from different angles, now, I am much better at improvising in speeches and defending my opinion, I have become a better speaker. Also, thanks to participation in the Scatec Youth Debate Club, I gained more self-confidence.
– Veniamin Kod, Project participant