Why this work exists

The problem the work addresses

The people closest to a local problem usually understand it best, but often lack the skills, tools and support to solve it. DreamSpace Academy thinks seven conditions cause this. Each one is written as a condition so that it can be checked against evidence.

Where the evidence differs from one region to another, the page says so. Where it does not, no regional difference is claimed.

The conditions behind the problem

1. Few local people can run services themselves

The war, and economies cut off from the rest of the country, left these regions with services but without the people and skills to run them. When a funded programme ends, the ability to run the next one does not stay behind.

Research on peacebuilding points the same way. In Jaffna after the war, schools were found unable to do the main work of reconciliation. Education run in the community, outside school, could help, but could not reach the deeper inequalities underneath[67].

Across a wider set of cases, work that built relationships and trust was seen only in education outside school, mostly run by community groups and charities[65].

Research in Sri Lanka argues for combining classes in school with learning outside it. The school system does not reach every child, and community groups have little room to work on their own[66].

2. The state has promised more than it can deliver in rural schools

Sri Lanka’s curriculum reform makes ICT and Entrepreneurship & Financial Literacy compulsory essential subjects in Grades 6 to 9 for the first time. It starts in 2026 with Grades 1 and 6, and covers the full range of grades by 2029[61, 62].

The means to teach those subjects were never built:

• About 19% of the schools with the fewest resources have an IT lab, compared with 72% of the best-resourced.
• In the technology stream there are 35.3 students for every teacher, against a national average of 12.8[63].
• In households in the estate sector (the plantation areas), a little over one per cent own a computer[58].

The academy sees this as a need it can help meet, not as competition. The state has promised something it cannot yet deliver in rural areas, so it needs partners.

Spreading support away from the centre is also a stated national priority. Working with rural schools carries out a government policy; it does not ask for an exception to one.

3. Training on its own does not lead to income

Skill is not what is missing. What is missing is what has to come with it: money, a way to reach buyers, introductions, and support that carries on. This is covered in full below.

4. There is no local hub, so people leave

Sri Lanka’s support for new businesses is concentrated in Colombo. Money for very young businesses is scarce across the country, and no place in Sri Lanka appears among the world’s ranked innovation clusters.

There is little local venture capital (investment in young companies in exchange for a share), so new businesses run on their founders’ own money, small private investors or foreign grants. That is true of the whole system, before it is true of any one organisation working in it.

Nationally, skilled people moving abroad is expected to slow growth over the next few years[60]. The academy’s own record shows movement both ways. Some people stayed and started businesses locally. Others left because their families needed the income, and later came back. Skilled people move around; they are not simply lost.

5. Most programmes start too late

Children understand different parts of business at different ages:

• Saving can be learned from about age six, through hands-on play[43].
• Profit is understood in middle childhood, but only after an earlier idea has been taught[45].
• Children cannot clearly tell owning a business apart from working in one until about age twelve or thirteen[44].

The closest trial to this work involved about 2,751 children aged eleven and twelve. It found clear gains in the personal skills used in enterprise (what researchers call non-cognitive skills), no gain in business knowledge, and a fall in how many children said they meant to start a business afterwards[39].

The academy reached the same conclusion from its own work before finding the research. Starting with people aged eighteen and over proved too late for lasting change, which is why the work moved into schools.

6. Learners are less ready than enrolment suggests

What holds teaching back most is whether learners are ready for it, more than equipment, internet access or the course plan.

In one selected group, five of about fourteen learners could repeat a program they had been shown, and none wrote one on their own. The fastest finishers could not explain why the skills mattered.

A trainer looking across many sessions put it plainly. Fewer than one in ten learners were ready for the planned content. The biggest problem was not buildings, laptops, internet or tools. It was the gap between what learners could already do and what the session expected. Attendance drops when the work gets harder.

Other studies say the same. How much teaching someone gets makes the difference: a single workshop produced no clear gains where a course of several sessions did[40]. Teaching about money changes what people know far more than what they do.

In the plantation areas the picture is starker. Literacy there is falling, and almost everyone who goes online does so on a smartphone. A group that has never used a desktop computer does not need the advanced module.

This is why more programmes is the wrong answer. Adding more classes without first measuring where learners start leads to the same drop-off. The answer is to:

• measure what learners can do when they join
• teach the basics first
• give enough teaching time for it to make a difference

7. The evidence that would settle this is missing

The academy’s search of the research found these gaps:

• No study that clearly links a rural makerspace to lasting income.
• No study of maker education that includes Sri Lanka.
• No evidence from Sri Lanka on whether teaching entrepreneurship to young children works, only government plans to do it.
• The nearest usable evidence comes from Rwanda. Nobody has tested whether it holds in rural Sri Lanka, which is recovering from war and uses more than one language.
• The only study of start-ups in one part of Sri Lanka, rather than the whole country, covers the Northern Province. There is none for the East or the plantation areas.

The gap is part of the problem. Funders put money where results have been measured, so a region nobody measures stays underfunded. That makes the fourth condition, the missing local hub, worse.

Why training alone does not lead to income

Of the seven conditions, the third one changes most what an organisation should build.

Studies of training programmes come to the same answer from the other side. Training on its own does little or nothing, and what it does often fades:

• Only about 29% of short-term measures of earnings show a gain.
• A review of thirty-seven evaluations found that training did not quickly lead to people starting businesses or earning more.
• In the most rigorous skills trial, the effects faded within twelve to fifteen months[55, 56].

Training plus something alongside it works differently:

• A job referral produced a large rise in earnings where training alone had done nothing.
• A one-off payment of money faded over the years. Packages that combined money, training and supervision that carried on produced gains that lasted.
• Making things on its own builds only some of the skills needed to start a business, unless clear business programmes and incubation (hands-on support for a new venture) are added on top[6, 32].

This is the weakest link in the academy’s thinking, but its risk is known in advance. Run training without those other inputs, and the gain fades on a timetable the research can already predict.

That is why the academy builds an ecosystem, with money, introductions and contact over several years, rather than running a course on its own.

DreamSpace Academy calls those inputs couplings: the things that have to come with training before it turns into a living. There are four:

• money
• access to buyers and markets
• introductions
• contact that carries on after a programme ends

What the academy does not argue

• The academy does not say that aid, or grant money, is the problem. Grant funding is one of the three sources that pay for this work.
• It does not say that outside knowledge is the problem. Bringing the world in is half of what the academy commits to. The person solving the problem has to be local. The tools, money and expertise can come from anywhere.
• It does not say that the North and East have the worst unemployment in the country. They do not, and the national labour-force figures show it[57]. The point here is a different one: the war changed communities, economies and the environment.
• It does not say that any of this is unique to Sri Lanka. Most of these conditions are found across the global South. What is local is the particular mix of them, and the fact that nobody is measuring it here.

How the academy’s work answers each condition

Each condition calls for a different part of the work, which is why the academy runs several streams of work side by side.

• Few local people can run services: build up local people rather than deliver services to them.
• The state cannot yet deliver in rural schools: work inside government schools, and train the teachers, principals and preschool teachers who stay after the academy leaves.
• Training is missing what turns it into income: provide money, access to markets, introductions and contact over a long time.
• No local hub: build one.
• The missing evidence: treat research as part of the work, not as an extra cost.

The theory of change sets out how those fit together, and how well each is evidenced.