Street2School in Motion: Lessons Learned from Engaging in Lab2Market Validate

Street2School is a youth-led nonprofit that creates mobile, community-based learning spaces for out-of-school children in Nigeria. Lab2Market Validate is a program offered in partnership with academic institutions that engages researchers and graduate students in testing their ideas for the entrepreneurial world. Over 16 weeks, participants dive into a guided experience characterized by funding support, hands-on exercises, practical workshops, and mentorship from industry experts. The Lab2Market Validate process is designed to help researchers explore, question, and understand the potential of their ideas. This report documents the first author’s participation in the Lab2Market Validate program, supported by a Propel Business Project, Haskayne School of Business, Master of Management student, and a faculty supervisor. This report documents how the Lab2Market experience helped the team to strengthen both the Street2School venture and its leadership. Street2School was entered into the Lab2Market Validate process to test critical assumptions about users, partners, delivery models, and economics, and to clarify whether a mobile classroom model could achieve problem-solution fit. In carrying out the validation process, our team drew on three main sources of information. First, structured customer discovery conversations with parents, community leaders, NGOs, and education officials. Second, weekly mentor scrums, sprint logs, and debrief notes. Third, internal retrospectives and simple pre and post-guidance from mentors on key indicators such as clarity of target segments, value proposition, unit economics, and partnership status. These materials were examined using reflective thematic analysis. The validation process led to a sharper definition of priority segments, a refined value proposition, and a clearer business model for a community-owned and potentially licensable Street2School model. It also supported early partnership progress. We conclude that the Lab2Market Validate process, combined with Propel student leadership, is a powerful platform for validating social ventures that sit at the intersection of education and entrepreneurship. The lessons learned from this validation process now inform next steps in enacting Street2School’s goal of reaching at least ten thousand out-of-school children by 2030 and offer practical guidance for other founders who seek to scale mission-driven models without losing their core values.