How the academy chooses its goals
The Sustainable Development Goals are the global goals agreed at the United Nations[64]. An organisation of this size touches a dozen of them somewhere, so DreamSpace Academy applies one test.
The academy lists a goal only if something specific stands behind it: a programme, a body of delivered work, or work somebody can go and look at.
Where the activity is real but the outcome has never been measured, the page says so. Where a goal that used to be claimed fails the test, the academy has taken it off and lists it under the goals it does not claim.
The goals the academy leads with
Quality education
Teaching term by term inside government schools in several districts, with written approval from the zonal education authorities, alongside teacher training at scale and the Changemaker Journey itself. The STEAM programmes are one part of the academy’s education work.
Industry, innovation and infrastructure
The makerspaces built, the grassroots research and development carried out in the academy’s labs, and training in Erode, Tamil Nadu, delivered by the academy’s own team with araCreate India, a related organisation.
Peace, justice and strong institutions
Work on information integrity (helping people tell reliable information from false), media work, and peacebuilding programmes. Measured by funding and by recognition, this is the largest body of work the academy has.
Media and information work is the largest single group of delivered work on record, and for years it was the least claimed. It was missing from the academy’s own mission statements, even though it was among the most funded and most recognised parts of the work.
Further goals the work carries
| Goal | What stands behind it | Limits on the claim |
|---|---|---|
| 10: Reduced inequalities | Where the work happens and who can reach it: work in the North, the East and the central estate sector (the plantation areas), and a documented pathway for including people with disabilities. | None needed. |
| 8: Decent work and economic growth | Ventures and small enterprises supported, and an impact-loan fund. Whether ventures survive is recorded case by case, and a register is still being built. | No claim can be made about how much income changed. There is no intake baseline (a record of income taken when people joined), so activity can be counted, but no change in earnings can be credited to the work. |
| 5: Gender equality | Programmes run specifically with and for women, and women-led ventures supported. | Shares of women taking part have been stated in the past without being worked out from a register of participants. Until that register exists, no share is published. |
| 14: Life below water | A marine venture that came out of the pathway. | The venture is described in the past tense. The academy makes no present-tense claim about a venture until it confirms the venture is trading. |
| 13: Climate action | Green-technology training delivered with a partner, plus environmental prototypes built in the academy’s labs. | The prototypes have no documented user yet. Built is not the same as deployed (in use by someone who depends on it), 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. |
Goals the academy does not claim
The academy removed two goals from this list, for different reasons.
The academy tried to find fresh evidence for it, and the attempt failed on what the goal covers rather than on evidence. No target under that goal is about farm output, so farming businesses cannot stand behind it, and one of the businesses being counted was a handloom producer.
The one piece of work that did fit, on conflict between people and elephants, 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. Until it is measured, the academy states this goal as what the work aims at, not what it has delivered.
A goal on partnership is being considered and has not been adopted. Adopting it would change how the academy describes itself, so it will appear here only once the academy has decided.
How the academy measures impact
The goals above are a way of describing where the work points. They do not measure it. 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 outside standards shape how the academy measures, and it can be held to both:
- The World Bank’s principles for education technology: ask why, design for scale and for everyone, support teachers, engage the ecosystem, and be driven by data[54].
- UNICEF’s pillars for technology used with children: safety first, demonstrated effect on learning, designed for children, accessible, and equitable[53].
The weakest part of the measurement is the medium term: the two to five years after the work, when the changes the academy most expects are supposed to show up.
The academy counts what it delivers well, and describes impact with care. It still has to build the registers and checks that would measure that middle period.