Sri Lanka’s first youth business program launches in Colombo, as Teen Academy opens its inaugural cohort on 8 August

Teen Master of Business brings a Wharton and Harvard-benchmarked entrepreneurship curriculum to Sri Lankan teenagers, complementing their schooling with hands-on, real-world business experience

Teen Academy, a new business education program for secondary school students, will open its first cohort in Colombo on 8 August, offering Sri Lankan teenagers a structured introduction to entrepreneurship alongside their regular schooling.

The program, called the Teen Master of Business, is built around twelve live modules, real micro-enterprise launches, and accredits business competencies, and is benchmarked against international youth business programs including Wharton Global Youth and Clever Harvey’s Junior MBA. The inaugural cohort will run from August 2026 to January 2027 at the Postgraduate Institute of Management (PIM) in Colombo.

Teen Academy is founded and run by Bradley Emerson  under Business Athletes Ltd., a Sri Lanka-based reputed corporate training, executive coaching, and strategic consulting firm.

“Sri Lanka has every ingredient other markets have built on — high literacy, English-medium capability, a young population, and no shortage of ambition,” said Teen Academy and Business Athletes Ltd. Founder Bradley Emerson. “Our schools already give students a strong academic foundation. What Teen Academy adds is the capability to apply it — to build something real, pitch it, and learn what it takes to lead, well before they turn eighteen.”

Emerson brings over four decades of experience in banking and education leadership to the program, including a period as CIMA’s Regional Director for the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa between 2007 and 2015, and service on national education-related committees in Sri Lanka. That experience shaped his conviction that young people benefit from structured, hands-on exposure to entrepreneurship alongside their academic studies.

Growing Appetite for applied business education 

Sri Lanka’s literacy rate stands at roughly 92%, among the highest in South Asia, with near-universal secondary enrolment. But each year, more than 450,000 students sit the G.C.E. Ordinary Level examination, and only around 40,000 go on to secure a place in a state university. Teen Academy’s founder sees an opportunity to give students — regardless of which path they take next — practical experience building, pitching, and leading a real venture, as a complement to the strong academic grounding Sri Lankan schools already provide.

In the Colombo District alone, an estimated 21,000 to 30,000 students aged 13 to 17 attend private and international schools charging annual fees ranging between  Rs. 1 m to over Rs. 1.5 m — families already investing heavily in an educational edge, but without access to a structured, internationally benchmarked business credential for their children.

International precedent

Teen Academy’s model draws on two established international benchmarks. In the United States, organisations such as Junior Achievement (founded in 1919) and university-run programs at Wharton, Harvard, Babson, Berkeley, Georgetown and NYU have shown that teenagers who build and pitch real ventures arrive at university and the workforce demonstrably better prepared than peers who only study business in theory.

In India, deliberate national investment in entrepreneurship education has coincided with the country building more than 159,000 government-recognised start-ups and over 126 unicorns, with the start-up sector generating an estimated $140 b in economic output in FY23 alone — a figure KPMG estimates accounted for 10%–15% of India’s total GDP growth between FY16 and FY23, and is projected to approach $1 t by 2030. Teen Academy’s founder cites India, rather than the US, as the more relevant benchmark for Sri Lanka, given the closer starting conditions between the two economies.

That contribution is not incidental — it follows a deliberate policy of embedding entrepreneurship inside the school system itself. Since 2016, the Indian government’s Atal Innovation Mission has established more than 10,000 Atal Tinkering Labs in schools across 722 districts, giving over 10 million students hands-on exposure to innovation, design thinking and problem-solving well before they reach university. India’s founders and policymakers built that pipeline first; the start-up numbers came after.