How the goals are treated
Alignment to the Sustainable Development Goals[64] is easy to claim. An organisation of this size touches a dozen of them somewhere, and a roster assembled that way tells a reader nothing.
So one test is applied. A goal appears below only if something specific carries it: a programme, a body of delivery, or work somebody can go and look at. Where the activity is real but the outcome has never been measured, the row says so. And where a goal that used to be claimed does not pass the test, it has been taken off. That is the section at the end of this page.
The three led with
Quality education
Term-based delivery inside government schools across several districts, with written zonal approval, alongside teacher training at scale and the learning journey itself.
Industry, innovation and infrastructure
The makerspaces built and the workshop floor, the grassroots research and development that runs on them, and the replication of the model to another country.
Peace, justice and strong institutions
The information-integrity portfolio, media work, and peacebuilding programmes. Measured by funding and by recognition, this is the largest body of work the academy has.
The third needs a comment. Media and information work is the largest single cluster of delivery in the record, and for years it was the least claimed. It was absent from the academy's own mission statements while being a leading source of revenue.
The six also carried
| Goal | What carries it | Qualifier |
|---|---|---|
| 10 · Reduced inequalities | Carried by geography and by access: work in the North, the East and the central estate sector, and a documented disability-inclusion pathway. | None needed. |
| 8 · Decent work and economic growth | Ventures and small enterprises supported, an impact-loan fund, and survival tracked over time. | A rate of income change cannot be claimed. There is no intake baseline, so activity can be counted but no earnings effect can be attributed. |
| 5 · Gender equality | Programmes run specifically with and for women, and women-led ventures supported. | Participation shares have been stated in the past that were never computed from a participant record. Until that record exists, no share is published. |
| 14 · Life below water | A marine venture that came out of the pathway. | Written in the past tense deliberately. A venture is confirmed to be trading before any present-tense claim is made about it. |
| 13 · Climate action | Green-technology training delivered with a partner, plus environmental prototypes from the floor. | The prototypes have no documented user yet. Built is not the same as deployed, and the two are recorded separately. |
| 12 · Responsible consumption and production | Circular-materials work: a recycling venture with several awards behind it, a plastics machine, recycled filament, mycelium biocomposite, palmyrah bioplastic. | None needed. This is the goal with the best evidence behind it, and the one claimed least. |
What is not claimed
Two goals came off this list, for different reasons.
An attempt to re-evidence it failed on definition rather than on evidence. No target under that goal is about farm output, so agricultural enterprises cannot carry it, and one of the businesses being counted was a handloom producer. The one piece of work that was the right kind, on human-elephant conflict, was dropped before it reached any user.
The activity is real: enterprises supported, ventures backed, a loan fund operating. The outcome has never been measured, because no intake baseline exists. That is a missing measurement. Until it exists, this is stated as what the work aims at rather than what it has delivered.
There is also a goal on partnership that is under consideration and has not been adopted. It would change how the organisation describes itself, so adopting it is a decision for the organisation to take rather than something a publication should do on its behalf.
How impact is measured
The goals above are a frame, not a measurement system. What actually gets counted, and the standard a piece of evidence has to meet before it counts, is set out under measurement and in the honesty rules on values and standards.
Two anchors shape the framework. From the World Bank’s education-technology principles: ask why, design for scale and for everyone, support teachers, engage the ecosystem, and be driven by data[54]. From UNICEF’s pillars for technology used with children: safety first, demonstrated effect on learning, designed for children, accessible, and equitable[53]. Both are outside standards the academy can be held to.
The weakest part of the measurement is the medium term: the two-to-five-year window where the mechanisms this model most believes in are supposed to show up. Outputs are counted well and impact is framed carefully. The middle is where the instruments still need building.