After a week of meetings in Singapore the International Cricket Council (ICC) has unanimously agreed to implement a 50 over league based structure for cricket playing nations to qualify for the World Cup. A much simpler format will also ensure that aspiring nations will get to play many more qualification games on their way to the finals. Another important announcement was that in as a commitment to the growth of women participation in cricket the ICC tournament will include the words 'men’s’ and ‘women’s’ in describing the championships.

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The World cup will be hosted by India and the qualification process has been named as the Road to India. Unlike on the previous three occasions when the championship was held jointly by India and its neighbours, this time it will exclusively be India. The qualification process will start soon after the 2019 ICC World Cup which will be held in England and Wales this coming summer. 32 teams comprising of the 12 full members and the 20 associate members will play in three different leagues based on their ranks to determine who will participate in the finals.

The first tier called the Cricket World Cup (CWC) League will consist of the 12 full members and the Netherlands. Each team will play 12 matches and the seven leading teams will join the hosts in the finals. The bottom five teams will go the Qualifiers. The second league will consist of teams ranked 14 through to 20 and will be called the Cricket World Cup (CWC) League 2. These teams will play 32 matches each and the leading three teams from this league will go to the Qualifiers. The remaining four teams will head to the Qualifier Playoffs.

The third league called the CWC Challenge league will be played among the remaining 12 associate members. Each team will play 15 matches among themselves to decide which two teams qualify for the playoffs. The six teams in the Qualifier Playoffs will vie for the two remaining places in the Qualifiers. From the Qualifiers the top two teams will fill the remaining two slots in the World Cup finals. 372 matches will be played in the whole process.

This will ensure that the lower ranked teams will get a sufficient number of competitive games in preparing for the World Cup. The new program also reduces the duration of the time required for qualifying for the World Cup to two and a half years from a previous six years. There is already a qualifying program for the T 20 teams and qualifying for them has been made easier by eliminating the participation fee which existed earlier.

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