I build businesses, and spend what they earn.
A Dutch trading company, a city I could barely land in, and four businesses that now pay for a school. This is how it happened.
- Based in
- Lahore, Pakistan
- Leading since
- 2020
- Ventures
- 4
- Welfare programmes
- 7+
In my own words.
“A charity that lives on donations closes when the donations stop. I would rather own the business that funds the classroom.”
I am from Lahore. I studied textiles, politics and English, and I am an ordained reverend — which is not a detail I can leave out of a business biography, because it explains most of what follows.
In 2018 I began working with Gerard Woerdenbag, a Dutch trader from Enschede who had flown into Lahore to look at manufacturing and found a city he could barely land in. One flight a day was getting through the smog. Rice stubble was burning at the edge of the fields, refuse was piled along the road to Kasur, and the power in his hotel kept going down. He wanted to build a biogas plant. I wanted to build the thing it would pay for.
By 2020 I was Managing Director of Woerden Enterprise (Pvt) Ltd. What began as a single energy project became four ventures — Biogas Pakistan, Horeb Bottled Drinking Water, REV222 Moringa and EXO35 — each one aimed at something Pakistan is genuinely short of, and each one chosen because it employs people who are not easy to employ.
I am also President and Chairman of the Woerden Welfare School System Pakistan, and the registered owner of Joshua Higher Secondary School for Girls in Youhanabad. That means the same signature goes on the business plan and the school roll. It keeps me honest about what the businesses are for.
The work I am most careful about is the brick kilns. Bonded labour has been illegal in Pakistan since 1992, and there are still more than a million people in the kilns of Punjab. Getting a family out takes legal aid, relief, housing — and then a school place for the children, because a freed family whose children cannot read is one bad season away from the next advance.
How it came together.
2013
The Pakistan connection begins
Gerard Woerdenbag starts working with minority communities in Pakistan — the relationship that everything else grows out of.
2018
The biogas project
I begin working with Gerard on a waste-to-energy plant for Lahore, after a trip in which smog cut the city down to one flight a day.
2019
The first Joshua School
Free education begins in Youhanabad, Lahore — tuition, books, uniforms and meals, at no cost to any family.
2020
Managing Director, Woerden Enterprise
The holding company is formed around four ventures: energy, water, nutrition and craft.
Today
Five campuses, 50+ water facilities
500+ children taught free, 1,200+ families supported, 300+ laptops donated, and families walked out of the kilns.
What I actually do.
Six areas where I have built something that runs — not consulted on one.
Social enterprise leadership
Building companies whose profits are structurally committed to welfare — not as CSR, but as the reason the company exists.
Renewable energy development
Waste-to-energy project development: feedstock economics, anaerobic digestion, and partnership with Dutch engineering.
Water infrastructure
Filtration and reverse-osmosis plants — commercial branches that fund free community facilities.
Education & school administration
Chairing a five-campus free school system registered with the Government of the Punjab.
Bonded labour rehabilitation
Legal aid, relief, housing and schooling for families held in brick-kiln debt bondage.
Cross-border partnership
Working between Dutch capital and technology and Pakistani land, labour and craft.
Three of the four are scripture.
I am an ordained reverend, and the names are not decoration. Each one describes what the business is for.
Horeb
Exodus 17:6
“Strike the rock, and water will come out of it for the people to drink.”
A drinking water company.
REV222
Revelation 22:2
“The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.”
A moringa leaf company.
EXO35
Exodus 35:25
“Every skilled woman spun with her hands, and brought what she had spun.”
A hand-felted wool company, worked by women.
Dutch engineering. Pakistani hands.
Our school banners carry the Dutch and Pakistani flags side by side, and that is an accurate description of how the work runs.
My founding partner is Gerard Woerdenbag, who runs a Dutch trading company in Enschede supplying metal parts and tools for the truck and trailer industry across Western Europe. He has been involved with minority communities in Pakistan since 2013 and visiting annually since 2016.
The technical partnerships and the capital come through the Netherlands. The labour, the land, the feedstock, the craft and the leadership are Pakistani — and deliberately so. The plan from the start was to buy as much as possible locally, import only what genuinely could not be made here, and train and employ local people to run all of it.
Day to day, the schools are led by Ahmed Durrani, Founder and Head of School — the man the children call Sir Ahmed, and the one who actually hands out the free books.
Roger Z. Moon
Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan
Two halves, one number to call.
Investment, distribution, donation, volunteering or enrolment — it all arrives at the same office in Lahore.