How the work is meant to produce results
Build the local conditions, capable people, a place to build, the money, market access, introductions and continued support that turn skill into a livelihood, and the network that connects an underserved community to the world, and measure whether it works.
Each of those things answers one of the conditions set out under why this work exists.
A deliberately sceptical search for evidence that rural maker education leads to durable income found none. So measuring that link is part of the work.
Streams of work that run side by side
The work runs in four streams at the same time. It is not one pipeline that people pass through in order. All four streams rest on a shared base of research.
Their results meet in a middle stage, two to five years out, before anything that deserves to be called impact.
Each stream is set out in the same steps: inputs (what goes in), activities (what is run), outputs (what is produced), short-term outcomes, medium-term outcomes and impact. Each also carries a grade for how well the evidence supports it, because the streams are not equally strong.
Capability: skills and delivery
The STEAM programmes are one part of the education pillar. They include:
- ICT and robotics taught term by term inside government schools, planned to run over several years
- makerspace and partner bootcamps
- the Changemaker Journey through Explorer, Maker, Innovator and Changemaker
Alongside them run business and entrepreneurship training, digital security and media and information literacy training, and training for people at work, including teachers, principals and preschool teachers.
The outputs are learners whose work has been assessed against a single completion standard, and a teaching system able to take on the next cohort (the next group to start a course together).
In the short term, learners gain skills, access to digital tools and confidence in what they can do, and schools become able to teach the syllabus they are required to teach. In the medium term, a local teaching workforce forms: alumni teach the group behind them.
The training does not stop with children. It runs from children to teachers, then principals, then preschool teachers. That builds the state’s own ability to teach these subjects. The gap it fills is well evidenced, and the state has already committed to providing this teaching.
Innovation & venture: projects to ventures
This stream covers the innovation and entrepreneurship pillars:
- lab work, with challenge-based learning (learning organised around real challenges) running through all of it
- the DreamSpace Lifecycle
- the four support modes, co-creation, bridging, domain expertise and funding, used in any combination and any order
The outputs are grassroots innovations and launched ventures. In the short term, an innovation is adopted by a real user who is not on the project team, and makers earn small amounts from products they made themselves.
In the medium term, the stream aims for:
- ventures still trading at twelve and twenty-four months
- local jobs created by alumni ventures
- money from the loan fund repaid and lent out again
- founders who come back to mentor
Small income from selling self-made products is a modest, low-risk claim: making produces things people will buy. Sustained livelihood is a different claim entirely, and it covers a wage as much as a venture.
Work created for others depends on both, and it is not measured yet. There is no employment count. Only the first of the three is safe to state plainly today.
Bridging & system: the academy as a hub
This stream covers the academy’s role as a hub:
- bridging, which means connecting people and organisations elsewhere in the world with people here
- building physical hubs
- working in partnership with the state
- hosting researchers
- giving local people a stage in front of visiting delegations
The network of partners and funders counts as an activity here, something the academy does, rather than an input it starts with.
The outputs are connections made, placements that give people outside experience, hosted researchers, and funding that reached other organisations rather than the academy. In the medium term, the academy becomes the first partner anyone entering the region talks to, and local organisations nearby are stronger for it.
Research on entrepreneurial ecosystems (the people, organisations and conditions around new businesses) agrees on this. Entrepreneurship comes from the surrounding conditions, not from a single programme delivered into a place that has none of them[34, 35].
Social mission: the conditions for the rest
This stream covers the conditions that make the rest possible:
- peacebuilding and social cohesion (communities that trust and get along with each other)
- media and information integrity at scale
- humanitarian response
- work with women and girls
- disability inclusion
- interfaith practice across five religions since 2018
Measured by how much is delivered, this is the largest single group of work, and for years it was the least claimed.
In the medium term, this work earns the academy its licence to operate: the community trust and standing with institutions that make everything else possible at all.
The evidence does not support “education and enterprise create peace”. It supports narrower and more useful points:
- how fairly educational opportunity is shared out can itself drive conflict or calm it
- non-formal, locally rooted programmes (run outside the school system) reach marginalised young people where formal schooling does not[65, 68]
- programmes that combine several aims and keep running do better than single-purpose ones
- neither peace nor training produces livelihoods on its own
The academy’s strongest claim about how it is set up sits here. Formal schooling and non-formal programmes each fail at what the other reaches, and the research argues for combining them[66].
The academy runs both, inside government schools and outside them. That is a claim about where the academy stands, not about what it has achieved.
Research as part of the work
Research is not a support function here. It is an output in its own right, and it includes:
- a base of evidence
- a register of case studies and the patterns that repeat across them
- the honesty rules, which set what the academy will and will not claim
- peer-reviewed publications
- a doctoral study hosted by the academy
The search for evidence that rural maker education leads to durable income found none, so producing that evidence is one of the outputs. The academy asks funders to pay for the work and the evidence.
How well the evidence supports each claim
This table grades the main claims on this page.
- Well evidenced means published research supports it well.
- Argued means there is a reasoned case and some support, but the evidence is not settled.
- Unmeasured means the work is happening but its results have not been counted.
- A hypothesis is an idea DreamSpace Academy is testing and does not claim.
| Claim | Evidence | What that means |
|---|---|---|
| Making builds skills, creativity and inclusion | Well evidenced | Supported across the maker-education literature[27, 24]. |
| Grassroots innovation works as a route | Well evidenced | The best-evidenced part of this whole theory of change[47, 46]. |
| Non-formal programmes reach people that formal schooling misses | Well evidenced | Consistent across the research on education and peacebuilding[65]. |
| Starting young, while skills and habits are forming, is better than starting late | Argued | The case from child development is strong. The evidence on results is mixed[39, 41]. |
| A makerspace leads people to start businesses | Argued | Evidenced, but in the United States, not in rural areas of the Global South[6, 32]. |
| The ecosystem the academy builds produces measurable results | Unmeasured | The ability to do the work is evidenced. How often it produces anything is not known. |
| This pathway produces durable income | A hypothesis | The claim this whole theory of change exists to test. The academy does not assert it. |
How people actually move through the work
The work is often drawn as one arrow: the STEAM programmes, then challenge-based learning, then grassroots innovation, then entrepreneurship, then an impact venture. Some people do take that route. The academy’s own case record shows it is not how most people move through the work.
Across the documented cases, exactly one went through every stage, in order, from the first to the last. People join at every point. Some arrive already innovating, some arrive through the labs, and one arrived because of work he had already published himself.
The theory is best evidenced at its end point and weakest at the step called conversion.
Conversion is the step where a motivated candidate becomes somebody who has produced a tested solution. It is the least evidenced stage in this theory of change. The academy names it so that it can be worked on.