GUA News: Why Didn’t My Region Get a Winner?
One of the biggest questions every year so let's try and break it down
September 8, 2025
by Diane Nolan
One of the biggest questions we hear every year is: “Why didn’t my region have a Regional Winner?”
The answer comes down to how papers are reviewed and how Highly Commended, Regional Winners and Global Winners are determined. Here’s a simplified overview below.
Every paper that reaches the penultimate stage of judging is automatically awarded Highly Commended. It is from this stage that the strongest papers, with the highest marks collected from all the judging panel progress to the final stage. Learn more about the judging process here
From there, we move to the Final Stage – Qualitative Review and where the Global Winner is selected and any Regional Winners identify themselves. During the final stage, the judging panels discuss and vote to select one Global Winner per category. This is the highest award given in the programme.
However, it is the Regional Winner that is the most confusing and it isn’t obvious until you know how so these are the Regional Winner Rules.
There are currently seven GUA Regions:
Africa & Middle East
Asia
United Kingdom
Europe
Island of Ireland
The Americas
Oceania
A Regional Winner is the highest-performing Highly Commended Entrant from a GUA region in their category.
Regional Winners are chosen based on how papers from each region perform in the final stage and this is how we break it down:
- IF, only one paper from a GUA region reaches the final stage….
- AND it is not chosen as Global Winner, it automatically becomes the Regional Winner.
- BUT, if two or more papers from a GUA region reaches the final stage it gets a little more complicated..
- IF, one becomes Global Winner – that paper counts as both Global Winner and Regional Winner and all the others remain Highly Commended.
- IF, none of those papers become Global Winner, then the highest-scoring paper from the penultimate stage becomes the Regional Winner. The others remain Highly Commended.
Why Some Regions Don’t Have Winners?
Because the whole process, from entry through to judging is completely anonymous, we can’t ensure equal numbers of papers from every region reach the final stages.
Indeed, some GUA regions don’t submit large numbers of papers to certain categories and those that do, through the process of elimination, some regions may not have any papers advance to the penultimate stage in a given year.
If a GUA region has no papers that reach Highly Commended that GUA region can’t have a Regional Winner either.
